Philip Zimbardo Quotes

Embryonic stem-cell research requires the destruction of life to create a stem cell. That's why I think we've got to be very careful in balancing the ethics and the science.

I'm a supporter of embryonic stem cell research. I do think there are very important moral and also religious questions at stake in the debate over embryonic stem cell research.

Bioethics is a very, very important field. As we get more and more in the arena of understanding science and getting better opportunities, the fact that you can do things with biological sciences that have an impact on a human being means you must have ethical standards.

My personal conviction is that science is concerned wholly with truth, not with ethics.

I've participated in meetings where there were concerns by ethical experts. There is no clear solution.

Computer programmers, biotechnologists, environmental scientists, neuroscientists, nanotech engineers - all of these fields, and more, should have at least a course in ethics as part of their degree requirements.

Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.

One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue ... Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.

I would not allow CIA to undertake activity that is immoral, even if it is technically legal.

Very rarely do people make big compromises with their integrity. Almost every compromise is a small one that is easily justified. The downhill slide is usually a result of many little compromises.

The blind willingness to sacrifice people to truth, however, has always been the danger of an ethics abstracted from life.

We live in a time when complex ethical questions are easily subordinated to the demands of efficiency, profit maximization, and maintenance or furthering of political power.

One has to weigh all of one's values always in relative terms. On the upside, you get people who are not acting on their homosexual attraction, who are avoiding the sin of practicing homosexuality. On the downside, you have destroyed marriages, traumatized children, and dead people who have taken their own lives.

If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.

There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.

Bombing people for economic reasons is as horrible as killing a pregnant woman.

When President Clinton starts talking about what is moral, as he did when recommending a national law banning human cloning, it's time for us to lock up our daughters.

I was highly aware, in writing [the book] ROOM, that there are unsavoury aspects to our interest in such cases, and I thought it was rather honester to include discussion of media representation in the novel itself than to cling to the high moral ground by merely avoiding scenes of voyeurism, for instance.

The study of law is valuable as a mental discipline, but the practice of pleading tends to make one petty, formal, and insincere. To be driven to look to legality rather than to equity blurs the view of truth and justice.

Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt.

There's less of a connection for a lot of people between the technical decisions we make and the ethical ramifications we are responsible for.

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

I'm a very good decision maker because I have core set of principles and so I can make decisions. Decisions can be very hard and you have to wrestle with them, but I'm able to get all the data on the table and figure out what would be the best decision because decisions mean ill for some people and mean positives for others.

I do not believe that it could never be justifiable to experiment on a brain-damaged human.

One of the most depressing features of the ethical side of the matter is that instead of such methods arousing contempt they are more or less openly admired. And this is logical. Canonise 'business success,' and men who made a success like that of the Standard Oil Trust become national heroes!