Ethical Subjectivism Quotes

There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.

What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens , to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other.

The belief that value judgments are not subject, in the last analysis, to rational control, encourages the inclination to make irresponsible assertions regarding right and wrong or good and bad. One evades discussion of serious issues by the simple device of passing them off as value problems, whereas, to say the least, many of these conflicts arose out of man's very agreement regarding values.

As long as I'm not hurting anybody, I don't think that anything I do is wrong.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

It is not morality that makes Jews bad, but the Jews make bad morality.... Morals and religion are the products of race.

Morality and ethics are nothing but footballs, wherewith people, strong people play to win points.

Only on the assumption of belief in the validity of values is the attempt to espouse value-judgments meaningful. However, to judge the validity of such values is a matter of faith .

There are those, of course, who deny that they need any form of authority. They are the popular atheists and agnostics. Such men say that they must be shown by 'reason' whatever they are to accept as true. But the great thinkers among non-Christian men have taken no such position. They know that they cannot cover the whole area of reality with their knowledge.

We proclaim human intelligence to be morally valuable per se because we are human. If we were birds, we would proclaim the ability to fly as morally valuable per se. If we were fish, we would proclaim the ability to live underwater as morally valuable per se. But apart from our obviously self-interested proclamations, there is nothing morally valuable per se about human intelligence.

Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver.

The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.

They establish distinctions and reserves which I cannot apply to myself, for I exist only as a whole; my only claim is to be natural, and the pleasure I feel in an action, I take as a sign that I ought to do it.

In the state of nature, wrong-doing is impossible; or, if anyone does wrong, it is to himself, not to another. For no one by the law of nature is bound to please another, unless he chooses, nor to hold anything to be good or evil, but what he himself, according to his own temperament, pronounces to be so; and, to speak generally, nothing is forbidden by the law of nature, except what is beyond everyone's power.

Never presume yours is a better morality.

I do not believe it right for one group to impose its vision of morality on an entire society.

Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.

Sin is a matter of opinion. Sins are only sins if you are hurting other people.

Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some people, as appropriate and suitable to them, while the same acts are immoral for others, as inappropriate to them.

The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do.

If you ask the government to impose morality, then moral questions will be decided by whoever has the most political power.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

One's sanctions for truth and goodness are established largely by individual preferences.

A thing is only right or wrong because you say it is. A thing is not right or wrong intrinsically.

I believe in pursuing my own morality. That is all I have ever stuck by. It is my own morality that really matters.