25 quotes
We want people to see it as not only legitimate but right and proper that they should pursue what they see as their own well-being.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
Life is, fortunately, not a continuous application of game theory.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
Mankind is not an agent; it has no unity of decision; it is therefore not confronted with any choices.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
The difficulty of seeing how values could be objective is a fairly strong reason for thinking that they are not so.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
Morality is not to be discovered but to be made: we have to decide what moral views to adopt, what moral stands to take.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
If we admire and enjoy the flourishing of human life, we shall naturally delight also in the flourishing of animal life.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
Hardly any part of anyone's conduct concerns only himself.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
It is in imaginative literature — including those parts of it which pass for history and biography — that what may be good in human life is concretely represented.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
Different people have irresolvably different views of the good life — not only at different periods of history and in different forms of society, but even in our own culture at the present time.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
Conflicts of interest are real, inevitable, and ineradicable. There is no question of doing away with them, but it is increasingly important that they should be limited and contained.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
The denial that there are objective values does not commit one to any particular view about what moral statements mean, and certainly not to the view that they are equivalent to subjective reports.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
Though we admit that the way to hell may be paved with good intentions, we are very sure that the way to heaven is not paved with bad ones.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
There are no objective values.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
The facts have to be determined by empirical evidence, and our thinking has then to conform to the facts, not the facts to our thinking
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
It is simply an error, though no doubt an attractive and inspiring one, to suppose that there is one evil — capitalism, say, or colonialism — the destruction of which would make everything in the garden lovely.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
The kinds of behaviour to which moral values and disvalues are ascribed are indeed part of the furniture of the world, and so are the natural, descriptive differences between them; but not, perhaps, their differences in value.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
To say that someone has a right, of whatever sort, is to speak either of or within some legal or moral system: our rejection of objective values carries with it the denial that there are any self-subsistent rights.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
Mutual toleration might be easier to achieve if groups could realize that the ideals which determine their moralities in the broad sense are just that, the ideals of those who adhere to them, not objective values which impose requirements on all alike.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
'Our sense of justice,' whether it is just yours and mine, or that of some much larger group, has no authority over those who dissent from its recommendations or even over us if we are inclined to change our minds.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)