Moral Origins Quotes

Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.

It is not the Bible that produced religion and morals, but religion and morals that produced the Bible.

Originally, ethics has no existence apart from religion, which holds it in solution.

Good laws derive from evil habits.

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

Man arose to high moral vision two thousand years before the Hebrew nation was born.

Absolutist morality doesn't have to come from religion but usually does.

Some of our earliest codes of ethics in the so-called Western World are little more than a rewriting of the Ten Commandments. Eastern legal constructions likewise arise out of the earliest spiritual traditions and understandings.

Morals: They're nothing but a coded survival instinct!

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon.

From the apparent usefulness of the social virtues, it has readily been inferred by sceptics, both ancient and modern, that all moral distinctions arise from education, and were, at first, invented, and afterwards encouraged ... in order to render men tractable, and subdue their natural ferocity and selfishness, which incapacitated them for society.

It wasn't God who introduced us to morality; rather, it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we felt we ought to.

To ask about the 'source' of rights or morals assumes an erreous conclusion. To ask about the source of morals is to assume that such a source exists. As if it existed outside of human constructed systems. The 'source' is the human ability to learn from experience and to entrench rights in our laws and in our consciousness. Our rights come from our long history of wrongs.