Ethical Context Quotes

I can discern that certain things have an effect on certain other things, but I don't view those effects as good or bad. If a context and a goal is defined, I could say if it's good or bad. But overall, I don't view things as good or bad.

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.

No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.

Trying to get somebody excited about learning and trying to get somebody to think in a moral context have begun to have a lot more significance to me.

No action is in itself good or bad, but only such according to convention.

Adam Smith is misread as being amoral precisely because people don't read his first book, because they don't read 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments.'

It must be remembered that there is no real reason to expect anything in particular from mankind; good and evil are local expedients - or their lack - and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws.

It is not goodness to be better than the worst.

It is circumstance and proper measure that give an action its character, and make it either good or bad.

Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

Many an act that man does is right or wrong according to the time and place which form, so to speak, its context; strip it of its surrounding circumstances, and you tear away its meaning. Gentlemen reformers, beware of this common practice of yours! Beware of calling an act evil on Tuesday because that same act was evil on Monday!

The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

The question of whether a thing is right or wrong, good or bad, must always be considered in relation to a persons needs.

Courage is morally neutral.

There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us.

We must recognise that duty and morality vary under different circumstances; not that the man who resists evil is doing what is always and in itself wrong, but that in the different circumstances in which he is placed it may become even his duty to resist evil.