Moral stupidity comes in two different forms: relativism and legalism. Relativism sees no principles, only people; legalism sees no people, only principles. — Peter Kreeft
In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel. — Roger Scruton
Moral relativism has a reputation for being compassionate, caring and humane, but it is an extremely useful philosophy for tyrants. — Peter Kreeft
universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality. — Arthur Schopenhauer
Morality is a private and costly luxury. — Henry Adams
Humanists hold that ethical values are relative to human experience and need not be derived from theological or metaphysical foundations. — Paul Kurtz
The idea of cultural relativism is nothing but an excuse to violate human rights. — Shirin Ebadi
Society is constantly recalibrating, redefining what it considers to be moral and immoral. — John Hurt
What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. — Ernest Hemingway
There are no "standards of Right". Ethics is balderdash. Each Star must go on its own orbit. To hell with "moral principle"; there is no such thing. — Aleister Crowley
Moral Absolutism Quotes
Young people want to learn, they are thirsty for knowledge, they want to understand and remember. The main thing is to teach them where not to go. Oppression, not to go; dictatorship, not to go; racism and prejudice, absolutely not to go. This is a moral plan [for society]. — Elie Wiesel
There is no god and there is no soul. Hence, there is no need for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is dead and buried. There is no room for fixed and natural law or permanent moral absolutes. — John Dewey
In my mind, there are few sins so egregious as extending life without health. This is important. It does not matter if we can extend lifespans if we cannot extend healthspans to an equal extent. And so if we’re going to do the former, we have an absolute moral obligation to do the latter. — David Sinclair
Maturity is learning to walk away from people and situation that threaten your peace of mind, self respect, values, morals and self worth.
It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result — ruthlessness in political life. — Richard Hofstadter
Rulers who destroy men's freedom commonly begin by trying to retain its forms. ... They cherish the illusion that they can combine the prerogatives of absolute power with the moral authority that comes from popular assent. — Alexis de Tocqueville
Atheism leads a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation: all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue. — Francis Bacon
A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.
What's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There's no excuse for it. No justification. No explanation. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we'll pay a very nasty price. — Peter Drucker
If there is no absolute beyond man's ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions. — Francis Schaeffer
If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong. — Francis Schaeffer
Only a person with convictions has a genuine possibility to be tolerant. He who accepts no absolute values but clings to polite doubt cannot be tolerant but merely indifferent. He is morally defenseless in the face of evil. — Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.
We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires. — Pope Benedict XVI
No culture in history has ever embraced moral relativism and survived. Our own culture, therefore, will either (1) be the first, and disprove history's clearest lesson, or (2) persist in its relativism and die, or (3) repent of its relativism and live. There is no other option. — Peter Kreeft
You cannot have a boundary-less existence, because your neighbor has his own boundaries, and who is going to give you the ethics between the two boundaries? If there is no objective moral law, relativism will take hold, and relativism ultimately will lead to self-destruction. — Ravi Zacharias
The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being westernized, but that the westernization is proceeding too slowly. — Claude Levi-Strauss
If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities. — Paul Johnson
The American elite ... is almost beyond redemption. Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush -- sophistry washed down with Chardonnay. — Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground. — Thomas Sowell
What the historian Elie Kedourie called "the Chatham House Version" - that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization - everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion. — Roger Kimball
Time and again, I have written myself into a corner, pursuing an answer to the old conundrum: whether individuals are obligated to act against wrongdoing or are obliged by uncertainty to “hang fire,” in that picturesque Jamesian image. Stated another way, the dilemma is this: If we reject universal moral laws as an aspect of absolutism and adopt relativism in their stead, how are we to judge others and ourselves? The issue is not original, but it is critical nonetheless. I am not excused from having to confront it because I am unequipped to be a philosopher or a theologian or because so many other men and women have struggled with it. Each of us is required to take up the grave matters of the age and of the day, as though no one before us has considered them. — Norman Lock
A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical. — Conrad Black
Just as man as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and his own spiritual and moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors. — Carl Jung
No age has been more prone to confuse the sin with the sinner, not by hating the sinner along with the sin but by loving the sin along with the sinner. We often use "compassion" as an equivalent for moral relativism. — Peter Kreeft
I want to give moral relativism the good spanking it deserves. — Peter Kreeft
Moral relativism says morality is relative, not absolute, I want to show moral relativism, in its popular form, is logically incoherent. — Peter Kreeft
You cannot build your life with a consistent worldview that is on the shifting sands of moral relativism. — Lee Strobel
Above all, creators remain drawn to the age-old paradoxes that philosophy grapples with [and]...that art occasionally resolves...the problem of the one and the many; unity and variety; determinism and freedom; mechanism and vitalism; good and evil; time and eternity; the plenum and the void; moral absolutism and relativism... These are the basic problems of human existence, and as far as we possibly can we arrange things to forget them. — Frank Barron
My first fundamental premise of our faith is that God is real and so are eternal truths and values not provable by current scientific methods. These ideas are inevitably linked. Like other believers, we proclaim the existence of the ultimate lawgiver, God our Eternal Father, and the existence of moral absolutes. We reject the moral relativism that is becoming the unofficial creed of much of modern culture. — Dallin H. Oaks
I suffer the anthropological malady diagnosed by Le vi- Strauss inTristes tropiques: I find it much more difficult to suspend value judgments about the society in which I normally reside than I do abroad. It takes physical and cultural distance to gain moral detachment and political noncommitment. Relativism implies a solid measure of indifference. — Pierre L. van den Berghe
we have made an extraordinary transition. From moral absolutes to moral relativism. ... Moral problems become medical ones and yesterday's sinners become today's patients. — Ellen Goodman
But all morality is of necessity shaped by context. I'm not talking relativism, no. To ignore the context of a decision is in fact immoral. — Anne Rice
In Conclusion
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