ethical comparison Quotes

Making matters worse is people's natural inclination to be easy on themselves, judging themselves according to their good intentions-while holding others to a higher standard and judging them by their worst actions.

The system of morality to be gathered from the ancient sages falls very short of that delivered in the gospel.

Kant, as we all know, compared moral law to the starry heavens, and found them both sublime. On the naturalistic hypothesis we should rather compare it to the protective blotches on a beetle's back, and find them both ingenious.

If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don’t look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights.

From one point of view we can say that we have human bodies and are practicing the Buddha's teachings and are thus much better than insects. But we can also say that insects are innocent and free from guile, where as we often lie and misrepresent ourselves in devious ways in order to achieve our ends or better ourselves. From this perspective, we are much worse than insects.

A viewer who skips the advertising is the moral equivalent of a shoplifter.

If we judge ourselves only by our aspirations and everyone else only their conduct we shall soon reach a very false conclusion.

If we compare a severely defective human infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog or a pig, for example, we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacities, both actual and potential, for rationality, self-consciousness, communication and anything else that can plausibly be considered morally significant.

The world needed a little Evil, so Good had something to compare itself to, but you couldn't let it think it had the right-of-way on the road and an invitation to dinner.

I prefer a thief to a Congressman. A thief will take your money and be on his way, but a Congressman will stand there and bore you with the reasons why he took it.

It is not goodness to be better than the worst.

All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal.

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.

There is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. Both kill innocent people for political reasons.

You've commited murder just as much as Helene did. You killed a fly with a human head. She killed a human with a fly head.

It is fair to say the New Testament is the most ethically sophisticated of the great scriptures; the proper comparison for the Qur'an is with the Old Testament - against which it holds its own.

Strictly speaking, one should not even rightly compare virginity to marriage because you cannot make a comparison between two things if one is good and the other evil.

Yeah, well, your people happen to be soul-sucking demons. (Wulf) You ever met a banker or a lawyer? Tell me who’s worse, my Urian or one of them? At least we need the food; they do it just for profit margins. (Phoebe)

If you take temptations into account, who is to say that he is better than his neighbor?

There is no more harm in adultery than in rubbing one's hands together.

When he is best, he is a little worse than a man; and when he is worst, he is little better than a beast.

Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.

Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light; for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop.

Do you, like a skilful weigher, put into the balance the pleasures and the pains, near and distant, and weigh them, and then say which outweighs the other? If you weigh pleasures against pleasures, you of course take the more and greater; or if you weigh pains against pains, then you choose that course of action in which the painful is exceeded by the pleasant, whether the distant by the near or the near by the distant; and you avoid that course of action in which the pleasant is exceeded by the painful.