Topic: Ethics

Quotes

Jon Elster, “Rationality and the Emotions” (1999)

• A person who treated his shame as a cost would in all likelihood never feel any.#

Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (1994)

• The ideology of equality has stunted the range of moral dialogue to triviality. In daily life—conversations, the lessons taught in public schools, the kinds of screenplays or newspaper feature stories that people choose to write—the moral ascendancy of equality has made it difficult to use concepts such as virtue, excellence, beauty and—above all—truth.#

Nigel Dodd, The Social Life of Money (2014)

• The growth of a market in children’s life insurance was shaped by changes in the way that children themselves were valued: these began as a means of giving the “sacred” child a proper burial, later becoming a means of investing in their future education. Neither life not children’s insurance was a straightforward case of commodification or an instance of the encroachment of market values into terrain whose moral fabric they immediately destroyed.#

David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

• As the self-love of one person is naturally contrary to that of another, these several interested passions are obliged to adjust themselves after such a manner as to concur in some system of conduct and behaviour.#

John Rawls, “Two Concepts of Rules” (1955)

• One way of taking the differences between ethical theories is to regard them as accounts of the reasons expected in different offices.#
• As one drops off the defining features of punishment one ends up with an institution whose utilitarian justification is highly doubtful.#

James Buchanan, Cost and Choice (1969)

• In the externality relationship, by definition, trade does not take place. It seems reasonable to think that it is precisely in this kind of relationship that genuinely benevolent behavior patterns might be witnessed. Indeed, it might plausibly be argued that in almost all of our nonmarket behavior, there is potential externality and that the ordinary functioning of civil society depends critically on a certain mutuality of respect. #

Christine Korsgaard, Creating a Kingdom of Ends (1996)

• The primal scene of morality . . . is not one in which I do something to you or you do something to me, but one in which we do something together.#Quoted in Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (2009)

Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)

• There is an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1945)

Roy Baumeister & E.J. Masicampo, “Conscious Thought Is for Facilitating Social and Cultural Interactions: How Mental Simulations Serve the Animal–Culture Interface” (2010)

• To act responsibly is not simply to be held accountable; rather, it implies that the person considers the implications and consequences in advance of the action, in expectation of being held accountable. This is part of what conscious thought is designed to do.#

Richmond Campbell, Paradoxes of Rationality and Cooperation: Prisoner’s Dilemma and Newcomb’s Problem (1985)

• Quite simply, these paradoxes cast in doubt our understanding of rationality and, in the case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, suggest that it is impossible for rational creatures to cooperate. Thus, they bear directly on fundamental issues in ethics and political philosophy and threaten the foundations of the social sciences. It is the scope of these consequences that explains why these paradoxes have drawn so much attention and why they command a central place in philosophical discussion.#Quoted in Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990)

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)

• Almost any two actions can be construed as the same or different, depending upon whether they fall into the same or different subclasses in the background classification of actions.#
• There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. What happens is that something is done to him for the sake of others. Talk of an overall social good covers this up.#
• Some bucks stop with each of us … Why, precisely, is one specially absolved of responsibility for actions when these are performed jointly with others from political motives under the direction or orders of political leaders?#
• Patterned principles of justice focus only upon the recipient role and its supposed rights. Thus discussions tend to focus on whether people (should) have a right to inherit, rather than on whether people (should) have a right to bequeath.#

F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

• We have thus no choice but to submit to rules whose rationale we often do not know, and to do so whether or not we can see that anything important depends on their being observed in the particular instance. The rules of morals are instrumental in the sense that they assist mainly in the achievement of other human values; however, since we only rarely can know what depends on their being followed in the particular instance, to observe them must be regarded as a value in itself, a sort of intermediate end which we must pursue without questioning its justification in the particular case.#
• Like all moral principles, [freedom] demands that it be accepted as a value in itself, as a principle that must be respected without our asking whether the consequences in the particular instance will be beneficial. We shall not achieve the results we want if we do not accept it as a creed or presumption so strong that no considerations of expediency can be allowed to limit it.#
• In order to make ourselves act rationally we often find it necessary to be guided by habit rather than reflection.#
• Since we assign responsibility to the individual in order to influence his action, it should refer only to such effects of his conduct as it is humanly possible for him to foresee and to such as we can reasonably wish him to take into account in ordinary circumstances. To be effective, responsibility must be both definite and limited, adapted both emotionally and intellectually to human capacities.#
• We should be showing more respect for the dignity of man if we allowed certain ways of life to disappear altogether instead of preserving them as specimens of a past age.#

Ludwig Von Mises, Planning for Freedom (1952)

• There is no other standard of what is morally good and morally bad than the effects produced by conduct upon social cooperation.#

Anthony De Jasay, The State (1985)

• The source of envy is the envious character, not some manageable handful out of a countless multitude of inequalities.#

Ludwig Von Mises, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition (1962)

• Everything that serves to preserve the social order is moral; everything that is detrimental to it is immoral. Accordingly, when we reach the conclusion that an institution is beneficial to society, one can no longer object that it is immoral. There may possibly be a difference of opinion about whether a particular institution is socially beneficial or harmful. But once it has been judged beneficial, one can no longer contend that, for some inexplicable reason, it must be condemned as immoral. #

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1907)

• Each obligation that does not exist with regard to a mere idea corresponds to the right of someone else to make demands.#

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)

• Ethical principles for the reform of the world could not be found in Luther’s realm of ideas.#
• A healthy fear is a better sign of grace than certainty, says Spener, Theologische Bedenken.#
• The universal reign of absolute unscrupulousness in the pursuit of selfish interests by the making of money has been a specific characteristic of precisely those countries whose bourgeois-capitalistic development, measured according to Occidental standards, has remained backward.#

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962)

• There are thus two sets of values that a liberal will emphasize—the values that are relevant to relations among people, which is the context in which he assigns first priority to freedom; and the values that are relevant to the individual in the exercise of his freedom, which is the realm of individual ethics and philosophy.#
• Any end that can be attained only by the use of bad means must give way to the more basic end of the use of acceptable means.#

F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (1988)

• While it is true that traditional morals, etc., are not rationally justifiable, this is also true of any possible moral code.#
• These rules ‘are not derived from any utility or advantage which either the particular person or the public may reap from his enjoyment of any particular good‘. Men did not foresee the benefits of rules before adopting them, though some people gradually have become aware of what they owe to the whole system.#

John McKenzie, Authority in the Church (1966)

• Certainly the story [of Jesus’ temptation] means that secular power is not to be acquired at the price of worship of Satan; but do we grasp the import of the story fully if we think the only thing wrong with the offer is that it came from Satan . . . ? The offer is not rejected because Satan is unable to deliver what he promises; it is rejected because secular power is altogether inept for the mission of Jesus, indeed because the use of secular power is hostile to his mission.#Quoted in John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (1974)

F.A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (1949)

• All the possible differences in men’s moral attitudes amount to little, so far as their significance for social organization is concerned, compared with the fact that all man’s mind can effectively comprehend are the facts of the narrow circle of which he is the center.#
• To the accepted Christian tradition that man must be free to follow his conscience in moral matters if his actions are to be of any merit, the economists added the further argument that he should be free to make full use of his knowledge and skill, that he must be allowed to be guided by his concern for the particular things of which he knows and for which he cares, if he is to make as great a contribution to the common purposes of society as he is capable of making.#
• What the individual mayor may not do, or what he can expect his fellows to do or not to do, must depend not on some remote and indirect consequences which his actions may have but on the immediate and readily recognizable circumstances which he can be supposed to know.#