James Russell Lowell Quotes

I always felt like I was doing the right thing.

More important than your obligation to follow your conscience, or at least prior to it, is your obligation to form your conscience correctly.

Conscience is a man's compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one's course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

It’s a good thing when you don’t dare do something if you don’t think it’s right. But it’s not good when you think something’s not right because you don’t dare do it.

Be not familiar with the idea of wrong, for sin in fancy mothers many an ugly fact.

Every act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral, and not by economic criteria.

As the mind of each man is conscious of good or evil, so does he conceive within his breast hope or fear, according to his actions.

Prudence reproaches; conscience accuses.

Ethics is inescapable.

Most men only commit great crimes because of their scruples about petty ones.

Behaving morally because of a hope of reward or a fear of punishment is not morality. Morality is not bribery or threats. Religion is bribery and threats. Humans have morality. We don't need religion.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.

All moral laws are merely statements that certain kinds of actions will have good effects.

My work is based on the assumption that clarity and consistency in our moral thinking is likely, in the long run, to lead us to hold better views on ethical issues.

Fear is the mother of morality.

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.

They tend to be pretty abstract ones then, like doing what will have the best consequences; obviously you wouldn't specify what consequences are best, they may be different in some circumstances, so at a lower, more specific level, you may well get differences.

There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don't offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.

I'm just doing what my conscience asks me to do.

My conscience is informed by reason. It's like Kant's categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.

The purpose of a moral philosophy is not to look delightfully strange and counterintuitive or to provide employment to bioethicists. The purpose is to guide our choices toward life, health, beauty, happiness, fun, laughter, challenge, and learning.

I would like us to think about it more explicitly, and not take our intuitions as the given of ethics, but rather to reflect on it, and be more open about the fact that something is an ethical issues and think what we ought to do about it.