#ethic

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did. ↗

— Peter Singer

#history #philosophy #ethics

But for this book we could not know right from wrong. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#ethics #ethics

The argument has long been made that we humans are by nature compassionate and empathic despite the occasional streak of meanness, but torrents of bad news throughout history have contradicted that claim, and little sound science has backed it. But try this thought experiment. Imagine the number of opportunities people around the world today might have to commit an antisocial act, from rape or murder to simple rudeness and dishonesty. Make that number the bottom of a fraction. Now for the top value you put the number of such antisocial acts that will actually occur today. That ratio of potential to enacted meanness holds at close to zero any day of the year. And if for the top value you put the number of benevolent acts performed in a given day, the ratio of kindness to cruelty will always be positive. (The news, however, comes to us as though that ratio was reversed.) Harvard's Jerome Kagan proposes this mental exercise to make a simple point about human nature: the sum total of goodness vastly outweighs that of meanness. 'Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness and envy, and to be rude, aggressive or violent,' Kagan notes, 'they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture – especially toward those in need.' This inbuilt ethical sense, he adds, 'is a biological feature of our species. ↗

— Daniel Goleman

#human-nature #social-intelligence #anger

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. ↗

— John Perry Barlow

#bodies #cannot #coercion #emerge #enlightened

You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions. ↗

— John Perry Barlow

#any #codes #could #culture #ethics

No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. ↗

— Aneurin Bevan

#amount #attempts #burning #concerned #deep

Convinced as I am and as I am from my government that the world needs a new moral architecture over all I believe that this should be the first topic to debate in our world of today, ethics, moral. ↗

— Hugo Chavez

#architecture #be the first #believe #convinced #debate

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world. ↗

— Albert Camus

#ethics #man #upon #wild #wild beast

Live one day at a time emphasizing ethics rather than rules. ↗

— Wayne Dyer

#emphasizing #ethics #live #one day #one day at a time

It is straightforward for me to be ethical, responsible, and kind-hearted because I have the resources to support that. ↗

— Edward Tufte

#ethical #i #kind-hearted #me #resources