ethics

Friedrich Nietzsche | "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (1873)

1. This peace treaty brings in its wake something which appears to be the first step toward acquiring that puzzling truth drive: to wit, that which shall count as ‘truth’ from now on is established. That is to say, a uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth. For the contrast between truth and lie arises here for the first time. The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real… If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him.

Susan Wolf | from her seminal 1982 article "Moral Saints," originally published in The Journal of Philosophy

2. … one might naturally begin to wonder whether the moral saint isn’t, after all, too good—if not too good for his own good, at least too good for his own well-being. For the moral virtues, given that they are, by hypothesis, all present in the same individual and to an extreme degree, are apt to crowd out the nonmoral virtues, as well as many of the interests and personal characteristics that we think contribute to a healthy, well-rounded, richly developed character…

Julia Annas | "Virtue Ethics" (2006), originally published in The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory [21, p. 515].

4. “Do we have such a final end? It is important to note here that the idea is not a philosophers’ demand brought in from outside everyday ethical reasoning. It is just a very ordinary and everyday way of thinking of our lives. We get to it simply by reflecting that our actions can be thought of not just in a linear way, as we perform one action after another: They can also be thought of in a nested way, as happens whenever we ask why we are doing something, for the answer will typically make reference to some broader concern, and this in turn to one even broader. Given that I have only one life to lead, I will eventually come up with some very broad conception of my life as a whole, as what makes sense of all my actions at any given point. I cannot escape the fact that at any given point, my actions reflect and express the kind of person I am, and the nature of my ends and priorities.

Friedrich Nietzsche | First Essay of his late work, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) [15, p. 10].

5.     I was given a pointer in the right direction by the question as to what the terms for ‘good’, as used in different languages, mean from the etymological point of view: then I found that they all led me back to the same conceptual transformation, – that everywhere, ‘noble’, ‘aristocratic’ in social terms is the basic concept from which, necessarily, ‘good’ in the sense of ‘spiritually noble’, ‘aristocratic’, of ‘spiritually highminded’, ‘spiritually privileged’ developed: a development that always runs parallel with that other one which ultimately transfers ‘common’, ‘plebeian’, ‘low’ into the concept ‘bad.’”

G.E.M. Anscombe | her seminal 1958 essay "Modern Moral Philosophy," originally published in the journal Philosophy [20, p. 494].

6.     It is a necessary feature of consequentialism that it is a shallow philosophy… if you are a consequentialist, the question ‘What is it right to do in such-and-such circumstances?’ is a stupid one to raise. The casuist raises such a question only to ask ‘Would it be permissible to do so-and-so?’ or ‘Would it be permissible not to do so-and-so?’ Only if it would not be permissible not to do so-and-so could he say ‘This would be the thing to do’. Otherwise, though he may speak against some action, he cannot prescribe any— for in an actual case, the circumstances (beyond the ones imagined) might suggest all sorts of possibilities, and you can’t know in advance what the possibilities are going to be.