#morality

Here the contention is not just that the new Darwinian paradigm can help us realize whichever moral values we happen to choose. The claim is that the new paradigm can actually influence — legitimately — our choice of basic values in the first place. Some Darwinians insist that such influence can never be legitimate. What they have in mind is the naturalistic fallacy, whose past violation has so tainted their line of work. But what we're doing here doesn't violate the naturalistic fallacy. Quite the opposite. By studying nature — by seeing the origins of the retributive impulse — we see how we have been conned into committing the naturalistic fallacy without knowing it; we discover that the aura of divine truth surrounding retribution is nothing more than a tool with which nature — natural selection — gets us to uncritically accept its "values." Once this revelation hits norm, we are less likely to obey this aura, and thus less likely to commit the fallacy. ↗

— Robert Wright

#evolution #morality #nature

Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality. ↗

— Sam Harris

#morality #muslim #science

Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudo-sciences. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#morality #philosophy #science

Sometimes I wonder about good and evil. If the villain wins, isn't he heralded as the hero? I've tried so hard to be good since that day, but sometimes I wonder whether it's even worth it. After all, to be the hero, I have to win. ↗

— Sarah C. Yung

#morality #supernatural #teens #yalit #young-adult

The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with. Scruples are alien to the black panther. Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions. The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations. The self-critical jackal does not exist. The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly live as they live and are glad of it. The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilos but in other respects it is light. There is nothing more animal-like than a clear conscience on the third planet of the Sun. ↗

— Wisława Szymborska

#humanity #life #morality #self-deprecation #experience

She wanted him to tell her that when you love someone so hard and so fierce, it was all right to do things that you knew were wrong. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#obsession #love

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#morality #scandal #gossip

Evil is relative…You can’t hang a sign on it. You can’t touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger. ↗

— Glen Cook

#morality #cooking

So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalising effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing. ↗

— William Lane Craig

#bible #canaanites #god #immorality #israel

Moral grounds are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#morality #beauty