Definition of Ethical

Ethical

Of, or belonging to, morals; treating of the moral feelings or duties; containing percepts of morality; moral; as, ethic discourses or epistles; an ethical system; ethical philosophy.

Related Definitions:

An, As, Belonging, Containing, Duties, Ethic, Ethical, Moral, Morality, Of, Or, Philosophy, System, The, To, Treating

Ethical Quotations

I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.
Sigmund Freud

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.
George Bernard Shaw

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.
Albert Schweitzer

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.
Albert Schweitzer

It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.
Margaret Mead

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
William James

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.
Omar N. Bradley

Education is the art of making man ethical.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Criminals are never very amusing. It's because they're failures. Those who make real money aren't counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem.
Orson Welles

Islam, the third in historical sequence of the ethical monotheistic religions of the Near East, was very successful in establishing its monotheism, but had only very moderate success in spreading its version of Jewish and Christian ethics to the Arabs.
Carroll Quigley

Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change.
Lafcadio Hearn

Furthermore, there is no good ethical or economic reason for asking workmen and current producers to forego all economic gain in order to increase the purchasing power of all the wealth accumulated in past years.
Charles E. Wilson

At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn't mean that you can't think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places.
Peter Singer

You might hold an ethical position that it's wrong to lie, but if you have plans for a war in Iraq, and you want to keep them secret for practical reasons - to reduce casualties, perhaps - and someone asks you about those plans, you may need to lie for a 'good' outcome.
Peter Singer

In a situation where many national leaders do the same thing and look out for national interests, and with an issue like global warming, you're likely to get no solution, so I think you have to have some kind of ethical trump on some of those issues.
Peter Singer

I would like us to think about it more explicitly, and not take our intuitions as the given of ethics, but rather to reflect on it, and be more open about the fact that something is an ethical issues and think what we ought to do about it.
Peter Singer

My work is based on the assumption that clarity and consistency in our moral thinking is likely, in the long run, to lead us to hold better views on ethical issues.
Peter Singer

To date, embryonic stem cell research has not produced a single medical treatment, where ethical, adult stem cell research has produced some 67 medical miracles.
Mike Pence

If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. You can't buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing.
Henry Kravis

If you build that foundation, both the moral and the ethical foundation, as well as the business foundation, and the experience foundation, then the building won't crumble.
Henry Kravis

Stem cell research must be carried out in an ethical manner in a way that respects the sanctity of human life.
John Boehner

The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards.
Irving Babbitt

At the same time we are aware that our various religions and ethical traditions often offer very different bases for what is helpful and what is unhelpful for men and women, what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil.
Hans Kung

A big ethical question is what happens after people stop using the device. Does it degrade the environment? Could it have been designed so it would actually be good for the environment?
Donald Norman

The repudiation of the primacy of understanding means the repudiation of the norms of judgment as well, and hence the abandonment of all ethical standards.
Johan Huizinga

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.
John Dos Passos

Ethical religion can be real only to those who are engaged in ceaseless efforts at moral improvement. By moving upward we acquire faith in an upward movement, without limit.
Felix Adler

The Ethical Society, therefore, is like a Church in maintaining, and emphasizing the importance of maintaining the custom of public assemblies on Sunday.
Felix Adler

The platform of an Ethical Society is itself the altar; the address must be the fire that burns thereon.
Felix Adler

The ethical manifold, conceived of as unified, furnishes, or rather is, the ideal of the whole.
Felix Adler

More Ethical Quotations

Ethical Translations

ethical in Dutch is zedenkundig, ethisch
ethical in German is ethischen
ethical in Italian is etico
ethical in Swedish is etisk, moraliska, sedlig

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