Moral Responsibility Quotes

“When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“If I had faced it then, I wouldn't be facing it now, but sooner or later you have to choose between running and facing the thing you thought you could not face.”
― Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave

“The faint outlines of two packages on his front porch attracted his attention. The size of the packages matched his two packages that contained his Christmas gifts and handwritten cards for his son and daughter. Samantha wouldn’t do that, he thought.”
― Shafter Bailey, James Ed Hoskins and the One-Room Schoolhouse: The Unprosecuted Crime Against Children

“Genocide is the responsibility of the entire world.”
― Ann Clwyd, A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq

“I believe that all lives have equal value. That all men and women are created equal. That everyone belongs. That everyone has rights, and everyone has the right to flourish. I believe that when people who are bound by the rules have no role in shaping the rules, moral blind spots become law, and the powerless bear the burden. … I believe that entrenched social norms that shift society’s benefits to the powerful and its burdens to the powerless not only hurt the people pushed out but also always hurt the whole.”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger

“We can't have moral obligations to every single person in this world. We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter into our moral space, so to speak. That means neighbors, people we deal with, and so on.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club

“The problem with ID, of course, is that it leaves open the possibility that the intelligence behind nature may have a moral interest in us, having communicated already with humanity in the past, and might try to boss you around in your private affairs.

With hypothetical advanced aliens residing at a safely distant address in the hypothetical multiverse, that is - to the relief of folks like Gribbin, Dawkins and the New Scientist - manifestly not the case.”
― David Klinghoffer

“Evil does not just arise from nothingness, most of the time it is nurtured by society’s failure to activate its moral standards”
― Aysha Taryam

“You cannot stay rich in times like these without eating sin.”
― Zen Cho, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water

“Just to be clear...

Violence is never okay
Attacking another person is not cool
It is morally wrong and offensive to hit another person
If you support the actions of abuse then you condone the behavior”
― Germany Kent

“We believe that only government has the capacity--not to mention the political and moral responsibility--to promote the general welfare.

Father Kramer as quoted in Sweet Charity?”
― Janet Poppendieck, Sweet Charity?: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement

“Those last six words—'for a time such as this'—resonate with me to my core. I believe that in certain situations, we each have a moral responsibility to act. We all have unique opportunities that derive from our unique circumstances, and we have a duty to take them.”
― Kirsten Gillibrand, Off the Sidelines: Raise Your Voice, Change the World

“In the face of mass atrocities, we stand in mass indifference rationalized by logic that sees us through the day.”
― Aysha Taryam

“Knowing the difference between right and wrong is not some religious ideal; it is our moral obligation.”
― Ken Poirot

“Complacency has taken the place of outrage and demands for justice have been substituted for trending hashtags and unified profile pictures.”
― Aysha Taryam

“Today, while the cyber world rages with ideologies and passionate moral perspectives, the streets remain comatose, echoing nothing but silence.”
― Aysha Taryam

“What is worse than indifference is when people’s nationalism allows for the conscious rationalisation of brutality as part of a political balance sheet. It is but a grave oversight when people shift their responsibility towards moral values for the duty to obey.”
― Aysha Taryam

“You might be a person of high integrity if you showed it when nobody was around.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

“There’s a related quartet of views concerning the relationship between free will and moral responsibility. The last word obviously carries a lot of baggage with it, and the sense in which it is used by people debating free will typically calls forth the concept of basic desert, where someone can deserve to be treated in a particular way, where the world is a morally acceptable place in its recognition that one person can deserve a particular reward, another a particular punishment. As such, these views are:
There’s no free will, and thus holding people morally responsible for their actions is wrong. Where I sit. (And as will be covered in chapter 14, this is completely separate from forward-looking issues of punishment for deterrent value.)
There’s no free will, but it is okay to hold people morally responsible for their actions. This is another type of compatibilism—an absence of free will and moral responsibility coexist without invoking the supernatural.
There’s free will, and people should be held morally responsible. This is probably the most common stance out there.
There’s free will, but moral responsibility isn’t justified. This is a minority view; typically, when you look closely, the supposed free will exists in a very narrow sense and is certainly not worth executing people about.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

“Obviously, imposing these classifications on determinism, free will, and moral responsibility is wildly simplified. A key simplification is pretending that most people have clean “yes” or “no” answers as to whether these states exist; the absence of clear dichotomies leads to frothy philosophical concepts like partial free will, situational free will, free will in only a subset of us, free will only when it matters or only when it doesn’t. This raises the question of whether the edifice of free-will belief is crumbled by one flagrant, highly consequential exception and, conversely, whether free-will skepticism collapses when the opposite occurs. Focusing on gradations between yes and no is important, since interesting things in the biology of behavior are often on continua. As such, my fairly absolutist stance on these issues puts me way out in left field. Again, my goal isn’t to convince you that there’s no free will; it will suffice if you merely conclude that there’s so much less free will than you thought that you have to change your thinking about some truly important things.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

“Empathy is man’s greatest moral virtue, the force behind humanity’s paramount achievements and the creator of unbreakable connections; it is also under threat of extinction.”
― Aysha Taryam

“We are here, in an era of the strong, one that rewards a means to an end mentality, where qualities like empathy and compassion have been downgraded to attributes of weakness and gullibility.”
― Aysha Taryam

“Girls without their fathers were also at risk. I didn't learn this from the fairy tales of my youth, because in those stories the fathers were present in the castles and in the cottages. The fairy-tale fathers, however, were unforgivably weak and always thinking with their groins. These men would rather sacrifice their daughters than risk harm to themselves. Rapunzel's father loved her mother so much that he stole for the woman. When he was caught, he was a coward, and instead of paying with his own life he promised away their unborn child. Gretel was very much alive, as was her brother, Hansel, when their father tried to do away with them. Three times he tried. ("Abandonment in the forest" was a bloodless euphemism for attempted murder.) Of course, there was Beauty. Was she not the poster child for daughters of men who dodged their responsibilities and used their female offspring as human shields?
Fairy-tale fathers were also criminally negligent. Where was Cinderella's father when she was being verbally abused and physically demeaned by her stepmother and stepsisters? Perhaps he was so besotted, his wits so dulled by his nightly copulation with his new wife, that he failed to notice the degraded condition of his daughter. Snow White's father, a king no less, was equally negligent and plainly without any power within his own domestic realm. Under his very roof, his new wife plotted the murder of his child, coerced one of his own huntsmen to carry out the deed, then ate what she thought was the girl's heart. This king was no king. He was a fool who left his daughter woefully unprotected.
When I first heard these stories, I assigned to these men no blame because they worry the solemn and adored mantle of "father." I understood them to be, like my own father, men who went to work every day, who returned home exhausted and taciturn, and who fell asleep in their easy chairs while reading the newspaper. I assumed that they, like my father, would have protected their daughters if only they had known of the dangers their girls faced during those dark hours after school and before dinner.”
― Monique Truong, Bitter in the Mouth

“If collective action resulted in just one fewer devastating hurricane, just a few extra years of relative stability, it would be a goal worth pursuing. In fact, it would be worth pursuing even if it had no effect at all. To fail to conserve a finite resource when conservation measures are available, to needlessly add carbon to the atmosphere when we know very well what carbon is doing to it, is simply wrong. Although the actions of one individual have zero effect on the climate, this doesn't mean that they're meaningless. Each of us has an ethical choice to make. During the Protestant Reformation, when "end times" was merely an idea, not the horribly concrete thing it is today, a key doctrinal question was whether you should perform good works because it will get you into Heaven, or whether you should perform them simply because they're good--because, while Heaven is a question mark, you know that this world would be better if everyone performed them. I can respect the planet, and care about the people with whom I share it, without believing that it will save me.”
― Jonathan Franzen

“The moral standpoint must always take preference over the monetary standpoint.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Woman Over World: The Novel

“He is a good man, she thought. Or, at least, an earnest man trying to be good.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker

“Saya tidak pernah merasakan perlunya bertanggung jawab. Sekali saya mempunyai istri dan anak nanti, saya akan sadar bahwa tindakan saya selalu membawa pengaruh terhadap mereka dan inilah yang akan menggembleng saya untuk tidak menuruti hawa nafsu sendiri.”
― Budi Darma, Olenka

“Health and sanity do not rise by erasing all moral lines, Key to psychological health is finding the right balance.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence

“Although we are always influenced by brain or mental events to form the intentions we do, sometimes (and in particular when we are taking difficult moral decisions) no such events fully determine those intentions. We have a certain freedom to form intentions to act independently of all the influences to which we are subject, which I shall call ‘free will’ [...] given that that is our situation, we are often morally responsible for our actions—guilty and deserving blame for doing what we believe wrong, meritorious and deserving praise for doing what we believe to be good actions beyond obligation.”
― Richard Swinburne, Mind, Brain, and Free Will