Randal Marlin Quotes

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.

The church, inserted and active in human society and in history, does not exist in order to exercise political power or to govern the society.

When moral principles, rather than persons, are candidates for power, to vote is to perform a moral duty, and not to vote is to neglect a duty

Governments almost never act with moral clarity and for very good reason. They are dealing with competing interests.

In political matters it is very hard for a man in office to be purer than his neighbours, — and, when he is so, he becomes troublesome.

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises?

'Farscape' is a fabulous vehicle for looking at ethical, moral, political, and social issues.

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.

History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics.

I believe that we will see cases like these that will continue because we're talking about companies that are doing business with a tyranny and a dictatorship. And when they do business with a dictatorship, a tyranny, they will have problems like this. This, I believe, is the beginning of several problems that there will be over the next few years because we are talking about American companies that now want to get cozy with this regime, and they will find themselves in very serious problems such as those we're seeing at this time with the Carnival Company.

The unhappy theory of business ethics is this: you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. Period. To do anything other than that is to cheat your investors. And in a competitive world, you don't have much wiggle room here.

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

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

Ethics occupies a central place in philosophy because it is concerned with sin, with the origin of good and evil and with moral valuations. And since these problems have a universal significance, the sphere of ethics is wider than is generally supposed. It deals with meaning and value and its province is the world in which the distinction between good and evil is drawn, evaluations are made and meaning is sought.

Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it's a bit of both. The question must not be greeted with reflex hysteria but decided quietly, soberly and on its own merits. We need less emotion and more thought.

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.

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!

Ethics is inescapable.

As a society we can't live without moral considerations. We do have to protect the public good. And markets are not designed to do that, so we need a political process.

All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.

Perhaps the most difficult ethical problem of the scientific community arises not so much from conflict with other subcultures as from its own success. Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.

I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.

We've all made bad decisions, but they haven't always been resulting in the deaths of innocent people.

I never thought of political endeavors primarily in terms of power and prestige, and I never thought of economic endeavors primarily in terms of wealth and position.

The propensity to avoid moral considerations was producing not simply a politically illiterate and authoritarian society, but one that was increasingly saturated in violence and a culture of cruelty. Needless to say, all of these forces intensified the increasing militarization and corporatization of higher education, along with the privatizing of everyday life.