Ethical Discourse Quotes

Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the world's most influential living moral philosophers. He has written 30 books on ethics and held a variety of professorial chairs over the past four decades in North America.

Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.

I do not mean to moralise but to those who do, I would give this advice : if you mean ultimately to deprive the best things and states of all all honour and worth then continue to talk about them as you have been doing!

I'd like to do policy and I'd like to do philosophy, I'd like to be able to get into the depth, into the meat of the argument - that's the kind of stuff I want to do.

I want my kids to be in an environment where they can talk about values in a way that you can't always do in a public school setting.

The ethical debates are like stones in a stream. The water runs around them. You haven't seen any biological technologies held up for one week by any of these debates.

There are two books that I often travel with; one is 'The Theory on Moral Sentiments' by Adam Smith. The other is 'The Meditations.' It's not that I agree with either views expressed in the books, but I believe ideas and thoughts of older generations can offer food for thought for the current generation.

In general, I agree with Socrates that what democracies badly need is the examined life, and we need to think critically about ourselves.

The platform of an Ethical Society is itself the altar; the address must be the fire that burns thereon.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

Moralists love to discourse on the hollowness of success; about the hollowness of failure they are silent.

No one is helped when cultural critics use their voices irresponsibly.

A Socrates in every classroom.

I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.

When Socrates was about 30, and his father was long dead, he was still pursuing the art of sculpture, but from necessity, and without much inclination.

No doubt science cannot admit of compromises, and can only bring out the complete truth. Hence there must be controversy, and the strife may be, and sometimes must be, sharp. But must it even then be personal? Does it help science to attack the man as well as the statement? On the contrary, has not science the noble privilege of carrying on its controversies without personal quarrels?

We should not be conned or succumb to the disingenuous and flawed narrative that the only way to engage politically is through the secular democratic process. It is prohibited and haram [religiously forbidden].

Ethical maxims are bandied about as a sort of current coin of discourse, and, being never melted down for use, those that are of base metal are never detected.

Data scientists: we should not be the arbiters of truth. We should be translators of ethical discussions that happen in larger society.

I consider theology to be the rhetoric of morals.