Wanting to die (or 'suicidal ideation'as the experts would have it) goes hand in hand with the illness. It is a symptom of severe depression, not a character failing or moral flaw. Nor is it, truly, a desire to die so much as a fervent wish not to go...
I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of t...
People become desensitized to many things going on around them. It is because they always see it on the tv, hear it on the radio, read or watch it on the internet, hear about it at work etc. Then immoral acts are tuned to a deaf ear. Then no one want...
But virtue, by the bare statement of its actions, can so affect men's minds as to create at once both admiration of the things done and desire to imitate the doers of them. The goods of fortune we would possess and would enjoy; those of virtue we lon...
The argument that personal moral views should not be imposed on others when it comes to lawmaking is incoherent and misleading. It is incoherent because a great deal of law implicitly "imposes" a particular moral view on the wider society. It would b...
Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, auto...
If we take the position that an assessment that veganism is morally preferable to vegetarianism is not possible because we are all “on our own journey,” then moral assessment becomes completely impossible or is speciesist. It is impossible becaus...
At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.
The truth is that we were so spiritually and morally bankrupt that we could not even see some of those lines: we stepped over them blindly. Other times we saw the lines alright, but we to cross them. Alcohol gave us the false courage to do it and num...
Human beings have capitalized on the silence of animals, just as certain human beings have historically imposed silence on certain other human beings by denying slaves the right to literacy, denying women the right to own property, and denying both t...
We proclaim human intelligence to be morally valuable per se because we are human. If we were birds, we would proclaim the ability to fly as morally valuable per se. If we were fish, we would proclaim the ability to live underwater as morally valuabl...
Morality is only moral when it is voluntary.
morality is moral only when it is voluntary
'Moral police' is my new word. I am very against the media doing moral policing, giving opinions on actor's lives. Media should not become moral police; they should just report.
The moral man is necessarily narrow in that he knows no other enemy than the 'immoral' man. 'He who is not moral is immoral!' and accordingly reprobate, despicable, etc. Therefore, the moral man can never comprehend the egoist.
Property is not the sacred right. When a rich man becomes poor it is a misfortune, it is not a moral evil. When a poor man becomes destitute, it is a moral evil, teeming with consequences and injurious to society and morality.
There's always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won't reflect the storyteller's true beliefs, it will only r...
Clean bodies, pure morals.
Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.
Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.
The fundamental issue is the moral issue.
