Moral Culpability Quotes & Sayings

The intellectual and moral failures common to America's general officer corps in Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in American generalship. Any explanation that fixes culpability on individuals is insufficient. No one leader, civilian or military, caused failure in Vietnam or Iraq. Different military and civilian leaders in the two conflicts produced similar results. In both conflicts, the general officer corps designed to advise policymakers, prepare forces and conduct operations failed to perform its intended functions. — Paul Yingling

I think our refusal to read {some} novels exactly corresponds with..our refusal to confront inconvenient facts of a changing world and our moral culpability in what our government has done in our name . . . While more novels are read than ever before--those are escapist novels--so as to forget what we need to remember. — Aleksandar Hemon

It's interesting that we can always find someone who will give an articulate and persuasive defense for the ethical legitimacy of some of the activities that God has judged to be an outrage to Him. As humans, our ability to defend ourselves from moral culpability is quite developed and nuanced. We become a culture in trouble when we begin to call evil good and good evil. To do that, we must distort the conscience, and, in essence, make man the final authority in life. All one has to do is to adjust his conscience to suit his ethic. Then we can live life with peace of mind, thinking that we are living in a state of righteousness. — R.C. Sproul

However, the outcome is inconsistent with the general principle that people should not be punished in the absence of culpability, since one who acts on the basis of a reasonable mistake of law lacks moral blameworthiness. — Joshua Dressler

[M]aterialism clearly poses a bit of a problem for a central tenet of the justice system - namely, that people exert free will in their actions, including their criminal actions. If actions are merely the inevitable consequences of hard-wired brain circuitry - or, pushing the chain of causation back a step, of the genes we inherit from our parents - then the concept of genuine moral culpability becomes untenable. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz