#oral

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

A quiet conscience makes one strong! ↗

— Anne Frank

#integrity #morality #peace #spirituality #strength

If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needless human misery. ↗

— Sam Harris

#neuroscience #well-being #science

Having to face him at a competency hearing is like getting to hell and finding out that the only food available is raw liver-insult added to injury. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#jodi-picoult #moral #perfect-match #ran #food

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#moral #hypocrisy

If there was a reason why he preferred the liberal tendency to the conservative one (also held to by many of his circle), it was not because he found the liberal tendency more sensible, but it more closely suited his manner of life. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#morality #motivation #life

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

Must someone, some unseen thing, declare what is right for it to be right? I believe that my own morality - which answers only to my heart - is more sure and true than the morality of those who do right only because they fear retribution. ↗

— Brandon Sanderson

#fantasy #morals #belief

Nature has made a mistake in the choice of my sexuality and I must do a life-long penance for it, for the moral power to suffer the unavoidable with dignity is lost. ↗

— Richard von Krafft-Ebing

#gender #homosexuality #lesbianism #morality #nature