Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.
Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.
The right thing at a wrong time is a wrong thing.
Marriage, like everything else in the world, is holy or unholy depending on the purpose the mind ascribes to it.
Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.
If an artist is driven primarily by social responsibility, I think the art probably suffers because, again, just as leadership has a rather defined end point or purpose, social responsibility would seem to have a very clear moral context.
Science itself is a humanist in the sense that it doesn't discriminate between human beings, but it is also morally neutral. It is no better or worse than the ethos with and for which it is used.
The highest virtue here may be least in another world.
But all morality is of necessity shaped by context. I'm not talking relativism, no. To ignore the context of a decision is in fact immoral.
There is nothing wrong with violence in itself. In any particular case, whether violence is good or bad depends on how it is used and the purpose for which it is used.
A person who steals bread during a famine is not treated as a thief.
I have to admit that when I watch a movie in which there is no moral context for the violence - I find that offensive. I think that's potentially damaging to society.
Evil exists to glorify the good. Evil is negative good. It is a relative term. Evil can be transmuted into good. What is evil to one at one time, becomes good at another time to somebody else.
Even if lives did hang in the balance, it would depend on whose they were.
The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.
There is hardly any deviancy, no matter how reprehensible in one context, which is not extolled as a virtue in another. There are no natural crimes, only legal ones.
There is no such thing as evil. Only relative degrees of good.
In order for once to get a glimpse of our European morality from a distance, in order to compare it with other earlier or future moralities, one must do as the traveller who wants to know the height of the towers of a city: he leaves the city.
No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.
All motivation is defined by intention. If the intention is to hurt, divide, or belittle, it's wrong; if it's an attempt to cope with or make sense of tragedy, it's something different. If it's commenting on society's flaws, versus adding to society's flaws, I think the audience can tell.
There has never been an 'original' sin: each is quite banal.
There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.
Intelligence is not a moral category.
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.
All the great crimes of history, lest we forget, have their genesis in the moral wilderness of their times.
