Quotes about Ethics

Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.

I say that religion isn't about believing things. It's ethical alchemy. It's about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.

We truly become special only when we believe, and act as if, we aren't!

Man's ethics must not end with man, but should extend to the universe. He must regain the consciousness of the great Chain of Life from which he cannot be separated.

-- Albert Schweitzer

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves - the ethical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty.  The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.

Morality is cast in stone, while ethics are cast in daily life.

Ego is vital but not noble.

The angel within me thrives on the devil within me.

One finds that no matter how sincere one's intention to be attentive and aware, the mind rebels against such instructions and races off to indulge in all manner of distractions, memories and fantasies....The comforting illusion of personal coherence and continuity is ripped away to expose only fragmentary islands of consciousness separated by yawning gulfs of unawareness....The first step in this practice of mindful awareness is radical self-acceptance.

Such self-acceptance, however, does not operate in an ethical vacuum, where no moral assessment is made of one's emotional states. The training in mindful awareness is part of a Buddhist path with values and goals. Emotional states are evaluated according to whether they increase or decrease the potential for suffering. If an emotion, such as hatred or envy, is judged to be destructive, then it is simply recognized as such. It is neither expressed through violent thoughts, words or deeds, nor is it suppressed or denied as incompatiable with a "spiritual"life. In seeing it for what it is - a transient emotional state - one mindfully observes it follow its own nature: to arise, abide for a while, and then pass away.

No system is moral, only people are.

While our managers debated what steps to take to address the sales and cash-flow crisis, I began to lead week-long employee seminars in what we called Philosophies. We’d take a busload at a time to places like Yosemite or the Marin Headlands above San Francisco, camp out, and gather under the trees to talk. The goal was to teach every employee in the company our business and environmental ethics and values.

The status quo is a product of our culture or our culture is a product of the status quo -- I’m sure which is the effect and which is the product -- there is probably a feedback loop there that is mutually reinforcing. But we have a culture that says "hey, look around. This place called Earth was created for you and you can do anything you want with it."

And of course we know that is flawed. We belong to it, it doesn’t belong to us. It’s a flawed world view. You see evidence of it all around us -- this idea that resources are limitless and we will never run out. Or that we can put anything we want to into the earth, throw poison into the sink. It’s very adolescent thinking. But yet there is a growing sense of ethics. We see a clear cutting in an old growth forest we say "that’s wrong." We see fish that are deformed from PCBs and we know that it’s wrong. We are waking up to the environmental ethics of living in paradise.

So, this thing called environmentalism is not new and not left-wing whacko. It dates from way back. Though religious conservatives prefer to call it “creation care”, it’s the same thing. It is an apolitical extension of a very long-term progression in the definition of what’s the right thing to do. Progress may occur in fits and starts with occasional setbacks, but the direction in environmental ethics is well established. There is an inevitability that goes hand-in-glove with the maturing of a species – a growing sense of right and wrong, extending to all of creation, including one of humankind’s most pervasive inventions: the industrial system and its built environment.

The spirit of entrepreneurship includes imagination, inventiveness and openness to the new. This spirit of creative response aligns with the capacity to exercise moral imagination and to see ethical problems in a new light. To be sure, our most fundamental ethical values -- values such as honesty, avoiding doing harm, keeping commitments -- are grounded in timeless traditions and are not likely to be soon abandoned. But it is in the application of these ethical values to emerging, unique situations, where moral imagination and the entrepreneurial spirit can make a decisive difference.

Only a society based on fear needs money.

It's not that I believe women are more ethical. I will say that one of women's greatest weaknesses is probably our greatest strength. We are incredibly hard on each other. We ask all the questions. Men are more easygoing. If you've ever been in a group of women, you'll recognize this: Nobody gives one woman the opportunity to lead the way without asking a whole lot of questions.

So when I say that I think we would have a different ethical level, particularly in corporate America, if there were more women involved, I mean that what women are best at is asking questions. Women ask questions over and over again. It drives men nuts. Women tend to ask the detailed questions; they want to know the answers.

Now, on the other hand, if we booted all the men out of corporate America, and we had all women there, quite honestly I think they'd be just as corrupt as what we have right now. I think it's best to have diversity and different points of view.

All the particular moral judgments we intuitively make are likely to derive from discarded religious systems, from warped views of sex and bodily functions, or from customs necessary for the survival of the group in social and economic circumstances that now lie in the distant past.

If we assume that the individual has an indisputable right to life, we must concede that he has a similar right to the enjoyment of the products of his labor. This we call a property right. The absolute right to property follows from the original right to life because one without the other is meaningless; the means to life must be identified with life itself. If the state has a prior right to the products of one’s labor, his right to existence is qualified . . . no such prior rights can be established, except by declaring the state the author of all rights. . . . We object to the taking of our property by organized society just as we do when a single unit of society commits the act. In the latter case we unhesitatingly call the act robbery, a malum in se. It is not the law which in the first instance defines robbery, it is an ethical principle, and this the law may violate but not supersede. If by the necessity of living we acquiesce to the force of law, if by long custom we lose sight of the immorality, has the principle been obliterated? Robbery is robbery, and no amount of words can make it anything else.

One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns--about ethics, spiritual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering--in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty. Nothing stands in the way of this project more that the respect we accord religious faith.

"The corporation cannot be ethical, its only responsibility is to make a profit."

What we need is a new consciousness concerning the idea of human liberty.

In those early days there was a general opinion that a business man could not be honest and make money or be successful. “Business is business,” was the slogan, with the connotation that no matter how sharp your practice it was all right if you did it legally.
“That is the jungle philosophy of every man for himself,” commented Mr. Russell. “It can no longer be practiced in the business world for it works against natural law. The future of great business lies in man’s comprehension of the principle of Balance in Natural Law and his determination to work WITH it instead of against it.
“The underlying principle of Balance in Nature’s One Law is equality of interchange between the pairs of opposites in any transaction in Nature. That principle must eventually be observed by big business, and the go-getter salesman who selfishly thinks that the sale he makes is the only thing that counts is not giving equally for what he takes. Therefore, I say, that equal interchange of goods and service between buyer and seller is the keynote of tomorrow’s business world when the vision of the modern business man awakens him to the wisdom of writing that policy into his code of ethics.”

Primum non nocere. (First, do no harm.)

Legal plunder has two roots: One, as we have just seen, is in human selfishness; the other is in false philanthropy.

No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose.

  One pang of conscience is worth more than many lashes.

This is America. You can be who you want to be, not who you should be.

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.

When I discover that i am you - that I am the trace of your traces - the ethical problem of how to relate to you is transformed. Loss of self-preoccupation entails the ability to response to others without an ulterior motive that needs to gain something, material or symbolic, from that encounter. Of course, the danger of abuse remains, if my nondual experience is not deep enough to root out those dualistic tendencies that incline me to manipulate others. As long as there is sense of self, therefore, there will be a need to inculcate morality, just as infants need training wheels on their bicycles. In Buddhism, however, ethical principles approximate the way of relating to others that nondual experience reveals; as in Christianity, I should love neighbor as myself - in this case because the neighbor is myself. This makes ethical responsibility for Buddhism not the means to salvation but natural to the expression of genuine enlightenment. It is what might be called the "nonmoral morality" of the Bodhisattva, who, having nothing to gain or lost - because he or she has no self to do the gaining or losting - is devoted to the welfare of others. The Bodhisattva knows that no one is fully saved until everyone is save. When I am the universe, to help others is to help myself. To become enlightened is to forget one's own dukkha, only to wake up in - or rather at one with - a world of dukkha. The career of the Bodhisattva is helping others, not because one ought to, for traditionally the Bodhisattva is not bound by dogma or morality, because one is the situation and through oneself that situation draws forth a response to meet its needs.

Unlike most topics in the MBA curriculum, which have remained fairly consistent for decades, ethics is a new area. What appeared at first to be only a trendy elective course has now become institutionalized as part of the MBA curriculum at Harvard, Wharton, and Darden. With the criminal convictions of insider traders in the 1980s, business schools took notice and jumped on the ethics bandwagon in the 1990s. In the new century, the collapses on Enron, WorldCom, and Arthur Andersen, the mutual fund trading scandals, Martha Stewart's stock sales, and the revelations of accounting fraud have kept ethics on the front burner.