Morality is character and conduct such as is required by the circle or community in which the man's life happens to be placed. It shows how much good men require of us.
There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth, paying one's debts, respecting one's parents and doing no voluntary harm to anyone. Those are all things easy to say and hard to do; they do not attract much attention, and win little honor in the world.
Conscience, the sense of right, the power of perceiving moral distinctions, the power of discerning between justice and injustice, excellence and baseness, is the highest faculty given us by God, the whole foundation of our responsibility, and our sole capacity for religion. ...God, in giving us conscience, has implanted a principle within us which forbids us to prostrate ourselves before mere power, or to offer praise where we do not discover worth.
-William Ellery Channing, "The Moral Argument Against Calvinism,"(1809) from The Works of William E. Channing, D.D. (Boston:American Unitarian Association, 1898), quoted in William Ellery Channing Speaks, Mark Harris, ed.(Boston:UUA, 1985), p. 5.
What is light without dark? Right without left? What is goodness without the option to be evil?
There are two principles of established acceptance in morals; first, that self-interest is the mainspring of all of our actions, and secondly, that utility is the test of their value.
The pure, the bright,
The beautiful that stirred our hearts in youth,
The impulses to wordless prayer,
The streams of love and truth,
The longing after something lost,
The spirit's yearning cry,
The striving after better hopes;
These things can never die.
The timid hand stretched forth to aid a brother in his need,
A kindly word in grief's dark hour that proves a friend indeed;
The plea for mercy softly breathed,
When justice threatens high,
The sorrow of a contrite heart;
These things shall never die, shall never die.
Let nothing pass,
For every hand must find some work to do,
Lose not a chance to waken love.
Be firm and just and true,
So shall a light that cannot fade beam on thee from on high,
And angel voices say to thee;
These things can never die.
The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements,
but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, 'I was wrong.'
I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monumentos of man's pride.
-Karl Kraus, Morality and Criminal Justice “The Riehl Case” Die Fackel, November, 1906
Value is the way animal interest and partiality are experienced in consciousness. As such, they involve a relation between objects of pursuit, animal tendencies and the intuited moral essences the psyche projects on what it seeks. We cannot speak of virtue and vice, therefore, without taking the needs and the desires, the very nature of the animal into account. These natures are diverse and changeable; any overlap between them is a contingent matter of fact. Moral truth thus becomes empirical truth about morality, a prosaic catalogue of who prizes what, a record of the moral history of the world rather than a guide to its correct development.
People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, 'If you keep a lot of rules I'll reward you, and if you don't I'll do the other thing.' I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.
As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown...
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."
From pride, from pride, our very reas’ning springs;
Account for moral, as for nat’ral things:
Why charge we Heav’n in those, in these acquit?
In both, to reason right is to submit.
Poetical Works [Alexander Pope]. Herbert Davis, ed. (1978; repr. 1990) Oxford University Press.
This is the difference between my morality and hedonism. The standard is not: "that is good which gives me pleasure, just because it gives me pleasure" (which is the standard of the dipsomaniac or the sex-chaser)—but "that is good which is the expression of my moral values, and that gives me pleasure." Since the proper moral code is based on man's nature and his survival, and since joy is the expression of his survival, this form of happiness can have no contradiction in it, it is both 'short range' and 'long range' (as all of man's life has to be), and it leads to the furtherance of his life, not to his destruction.
http://usabig.com/autonomist/articles11/egoist.html
The aim of morality is to give people a standard of action and a motive to work by which, they will not intensify each person's selfishness, but raise them up above it.
That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.
Aim above morality.
Be not simply good;
be good for something.
All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent enjoy the story. Let nothing come between you and the light. Respect men and brothers only. When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God,—none of the servants.
http://www.walden.org/institute/thoreau/writings/correspondence/1848_03_27_Blake.htm
Books about Morals
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