Scientific Ethics Quotes & Sayings

For a long time things were so bad. Very bad. Dark even when there was light.
The only thing that kept the dark back was the Forever Shiny Thing that was her secret ...
It is a word ... the word hangs on a silver chain. The word is HOPE. — Dean Koontz

Looking from the window at the fantastic light and colour of my glittering fairy-world of fact that holds no tenderness, no quietude, I long suddenly for peace, for understanding. — Daphne Du Maurier

Since most of our moral understanding comes, via metaphor, from a broad range of other domains of experience, and since we apply those metaphors to a number of different experiential domains, we should be wary of trying to compartmentalize ethics. The cross-domain mappings of the metaphors suggest the intricate web of connections that impose our moral ideas on other aspects of our lives, including considerations that are technical, scientific, political, aesthetic, religious, and social. — George Lakoff

Philosopher has given a rational, objectively demonstrable, scientific answer to the question of why man needs a code of values. So long as that question remained unanswered, no rational, scientific, objective code of ethics could be discovered or defined. The greatest of all philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it and why he evaluated them as noble and wise. Most philosophers took the existence of ethics for granted, as the given, as a historical fact, and were not concerned with discovering its metaphysical cause or objective validation. Many of them attempted to break the traditional monopoly of mysticism in the field of ethics and, allegedly, to define a rational, scientific, nonreligious morality. But their attempts consisted of trying to justify them on social grounds, — Ayn Rand

The scientific doctrine of progress is destined to replace not only the myth of progress, but all other myths of human earthly destiny. It will inevitably become one of the cornerstones of man's theology, or whatever may be the future substitute for theology, and the most important external support for human ethics. — Julian Huxley

We need to employ a secular approach to ethics, secular in the Indian sense of respecting all religious traditions and even the views of non-believers in an unbiased way. Secular ethics rooted in scientific findings, common experience and common sense can easily be introduced into the secular education system. If we can do that there is a real prospect of making this 21st century an era of peace and compassion. — Dalai Lama

The fundamental characteristic of the scientific method is honesty. In dealing with any question, science asks no favors ... I believe that constant use of the scientific method must in the end leave its impress upon him who uses it ... A life spent in accordance with scientific teachings would be of a high order. It would practically conform to the teachings of the highest types of religion. The motives would be different, but so far as conduct is concerned the results would be practically identical. — Ira Remsen

Man must begin to the unitary principle of man - knowing that there are not separate men or separate individuals, but hat the whole man idea is one. He must know that all mankind is connected with every other part of mankind, all geared together by the one omnipresent Light of God which centers all as ONE and motivates all as ONE. Until man knows that separation from God is impossible, even for one second, he does not begin to have knowledge. — Walter Russell

Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice. — Karen Armstrong

Religion has no place in the science classroom, where it may abridge students' opportunities to learn the methods, discoveries, and explanatory hypotheses of science. Rather, its place is in the hearts of the men and women who study and then practice scientific exploration. Ethics can't influence the outcome of an experiment, but they can serve as a useful adjunct to the questions that get asked in the first place, and to the applications thereafter. — Barbara Kingsolver

With love, when you let it go, life finds the ways and means to grow. — Debasish Mridha

... With the 'death' of God worldly values proliferate, separate out and are drawn into endless conflict with one another. This process leads to the formation of a world torn by an infinite number of value-conflicts, for 'rational' (scientific) knowledge, which, for Weber, is limited to questions of fact rather than value, is unable to resolve the crisis of values that it itself inaugurated. — Nicholas Gane

Going first is courageous. I'm just talking on a spirit level now. — John Densmore

Make no mistake about it, magick is an art form, and every true magician is an artist. — Lon Milo DuQuette

... It is not possible, says Weber, to confer the objective validity of facts on the basis of a value-judgement; and second, it is not possible to judge the value of values through the use of scientific reason. This leads him to maintain a distinction between science and ethics, the former dealing with questions of fact, the latter with questions of value. — Nicholas Gane

All their Immanuel Kants together couldn't do it! It didn't enter the heads of all their Kants to build a system of scientific ethics, that is, ethics based on adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

We look upon this shaken earth, and we declare our firm and fixed purpose-the building of a peace with justice in a world where moral law prevails. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Sperry's thinking about subjective experience, consciousness, the mind, and human values makes a powerful plea for a new scientific examination of ethics in the workings of consciousness. These ideas were crystallized in his paper "The Impact and Promise of the Cognitive Revolution" (1993). — Roger Wolcott Sperry

A US Department of Education; implementation of a scientific materialist philosophy; studies, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology; students taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and general ethics of a new socialist society; present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy. The whole basis and organization of capitalist science will be revolutionized. Science will become materialistic, hence truly scientific. God will be banished from the laboratories as well as from the schools. — William Z. Foster

The message of David Duke, is this, basically: Big government, anti-big government, get out of my pocketbook, cut my taxes, put welfare people back to work. That's a very popular message. The problem is the messenger. — Dan Quayle

Einstein himself said, You can speak of the ethical foundations of science, but you cannot speak of the scientific foundations of ethics. — Eric Metaxas

If there is a single maxim that runs through this book's arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them. — Steven Johnson

The most popular form of atheism is a philosophy called naturalism. Naturalism is the view that science and science alone determines what exists. What exists is what our best scientific theories of the world require. If something is not required by our best scientific theories of the world, then it does not exist. But this is devastating for ethics because moral values are not required by science. Science is morally neutral. You cannot find moral values in a test tube. So it follows immediately, from the perspective of naturalism, that moral values do not really exist. They are just subjective illusions of human beings. — William Lane Craig

The public has an incredible capacity for appreciating the wonder of our planet, our solar system, our universe. — Ellen Stofan

Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. — Maya Angelou

Despite my admiration for scientific knowledge, I am not an adherent of scientism. For scientism dogmatically asserts the authority of scientific knowledge; whereas I do not believe in any authority and have always resisted dogmatism; and I continue to resist it, especially in science. I am opposed to the thesis that the scientist must believe in his theory. As far as I am concerned "I do not believe in belief," as E. M. Forster says; and I especially do not believe in belief in science. I believe at most that belief has a place in ethics, and even here only in a few instances. I believe, for example, that objective truth is a value - that is, an ethical value, perhaps the greatest value there is - and that cruelty is the greatest evil. — Karl R. Popper

The second level of prayer is seeking. — Sunday Adelaja

No matter how limited their powers of reason might have been. still they must have understood that living like that was just murder, a capital crime - except it was slow, day-by-day murder. The government (or humanity) could not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time. To kill one man - that is, to subtract 50 years from the sum of all human lives - that was a crime; but to subtract from the sum of all human lives 50,000,000 years - that was not a crime! No, really, isn't it funny? This problem in moral math could be solved in half a minute by any ten-year-old Number today, but they couldn't solve it. All their Kant's together couldn't solve it (because it never occurred to one of their Kant's to construct a system of scientific ethics - that is, one based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication). — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Scientific research? Only when not at the cost of ethics-and first of all, those of the researchers themselves. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is impossible to be negative while we are giving thanks. — Donald Curtis

If we ought not to fear mortal truth, still less should we dread scientific truth. In the first place it can not conflict with ethics? But if science is feared, it is above all because it can give no happiness? Man, then, can not be happy through science but today he can much less be happy without it. — Henri Poincare

The true man of science will know nature better by his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience. We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy. It is with science as with ethics,
we cannot know truth by contrivance and method; the Baconian is as false as any other, and with all the helps of machinery and the arts, the most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more perfect Indian wisdom. — Henry David Thoreau

I do not believe that a moral philosophy can ever be founded on a scientific basis. ... The valuation of life and all its nobler expressions can only come out of the soul's yearning toward its own destiny. Every attempt to reduce ethics to scientific formulas must fail. Of that I am perfectly convinced. — Albert Einstein

I have been impressed by the realization that a few men have virtually 'decided' what experiences count and even exist in the world. The language of Western science
the reigning construct of male hegemony
precludes the ability to express the experiential realities it talks about. Virtually all the actual experiences of this world, expressed through the manifest and mysterious characteristics of all the different beings, are unrepresented in the stainless steel edicts of experts. Where is the voice of the voiceless in the scientific literature, including the literature of environmental ethics? — Karen Davis

Scientific theories never dictate human values, but they can often cast new light on ethical issues. From a sexual selection viewpoint, moral philosophy and political theory have mostly been attempts to shift male human sexual competitiveness from physical violence to the peaceful accumulation of wealth and status. The rights to life, liberty, and property are cultural inventions that function, in part, to keep males from killing and stealing from one another while they compete to attract sexual partners. — Geoffrey Miller

As I see it the world is undoubtedly in need of a new religion, and that religion must be founded on humanist principles. When I say religion, I do not mean merely a theology involving belief in a supernatural god or gods; nor do I mean merely a system of ethics, however exalted; nor only scientific knowledge, however extensive; nor just a practical social morality, however admirable or efficient. I mean an organized system of ideas and emotions which relate man to his destiny, beyond and above the practical affairs of every day, transcending the present and the existing systems of law and social structure. The prerequisite today is that any such religion shall appeal potentially to all mankind; and that its intellectual and rational sides shall not be incompatible with scientific knowledge but on the contrary based on it. — Julian Huxley

What our species needs, above all else, is a generally accepted ethical system that is compatible with the scientific knowledge we now possess. — Derek Freeman

Through our scientific and technological genius we've made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers - or we will all perish together as fools. — Martin Luther King Jr.

If a student works rigorously, no topic is truly foolish, and the student can draw useful conclusions even from a remote or peripheral topic. — Umberto Eco