Moral Luck
The burden of personal responsibility grows exponentially and explains why this age has seen a corresponding increase in rates of suicide, since the blame for a life that has gone awry can only reside narrowly within each of us.
Alain de Botton • A Therapeutic Journey
John Doris’s book Lack of Character noted that “situational factors are often better predictors of behaviour than personal factors.” Baggini suggests that plenty of Germans living under the Third Reich would otherwise have led “blameless lives” if they had not been put in an environment that brought out their worst selves. By the same token, “many
... See moreTom Butler Bowdon • 50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting Seeing - Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books (50 Classics)
“Even if a group of people can agree on how to treat people in the moment, consensus can change at any moment. Today’s virtues can become tomorrow’s vices. Like a sand castle, the tenets of morality can be destroyed by the tide of public opinion.” — David Pernell
morality is the key to understanding humanity.
Jonathan Haidt • The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
The responses could also be explained from the standpoint that the means don’t justify the ends: the philosophical principle that it is permissible to cause harm as a by-product of achieving greater good but not to use harm to achieve it.67
Michael Gazzaniga • Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain
The realization that virtue and sin alike are the inevitable result of previous causes (as the Stoics should have held) is likely to have a somewhat paralysing effect on moral effort.