1. The moral or ethical environment is the surrounding climate of ideas about how we live .
2. Our consciousness of ourselves is largely or even Essentially a consciousness of how we stand for other people.
3. An idea (in a sense) is a tendency to accept routes of thoughts and feeling that we may not recognize in ourselves, or even be able to articulate. Yet such depositions rule the social and political world.
4. It ( the bible) encourages harsh attitudes to ourselves, as fallen creatures endlessly polluted by sin, and hatred of ourselves Inevitably brings hatred of others.
5. We drape our own standards with the stories of divine origin as a way of asserting their authority.
6. We have the depressing spectacle of people not only wanting to do something but projecting upon their gods the commands making it a right or a duty to do it.
7. Relativism:-The idea that there is no one truth, there are only the different truths of different communities.
8. Nihilism:- The doctrine that there are no values.
9. Scepticism:- The doctrine that even if there were values , we would have no way of knowing about them.
10. Grand unifying theories do not often stoop to offer themselves to empirical test.
11. People have need for wasteful display in order to manifest their status.
12. There is a huge desire to find patterns of behaviour , enabling us to understand and perhaps control the human flux .
13. Threats to ethics : The death of god, relativism, egoism, evolutionary theory, determinism and futility, unreasonable demands, false consciousness.
14. An impartial moral law can bear very unevenly on different people, and it little wonder if people become disenchanted by an ethics largely maintained by those who do not have to live it .
15. For human beings, there is no living without standards of living.
16. Luck can do more to sway the ways our lives go than virtue.
17. The right reaction is not to succumb to the mood, but to reflect that the cure lies in our own hands.
18. Is the black and white an illusion, it may be as a result of a moral lens that imposes it's black and white on a landscape of different shades of grey.
19. One of the moral signatures of a society will be the extent to which the law allows the liberty to do, feel, or think the wrong things.
20. Death is like nothing for me, not because it is mysteriously unlike the things I have so far known , but because there is no me left.
21. When death comes we do exist , for we have to do the dying. It is only at the end of the process that there is no subject of the process.
22. It is not only the process of dying, but the subsequent annihilation that concerns us.
23. Authentic living means not just remembering that one day you will die but somehow living in constant awareness of the fact.
24. One thing that makes life meaningless and delusive is that it ends in death.
25. Life is a stream of lived events within which there is often plenty of meaning.
26. Meaning comes with absorption and enjoyment, the flow of details that matter to us.
27. Pleasure can be measured by putting together various factors: it's subjective intensity, it's duration, the probability of its happening, it nearness or remoteness from an agent in time, and it's effect on producing or inhibiting yet further pleasures.
28. Happiness requires engagement with the world, it requires reasoning and activity, and engagement with others , it requires real love and friendship.
29. Sinse nature has equipt is with a huge general - purpose intelligence, anything produced using that intelligence should count as natural and therefore healthy.
30. The principle of utility:- the good is identified with the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and the aim of action is to advance the good.
31. The cast of mind of a utilitarian is that of the engineer, not the judge.
32. It is not the job of a moral philosophy, and more than that of the constitution or a government to make people happy, but only to set a stage within which they can be happy.
33. Any full specification of a freedom is apt to indicate both what you are free from and what you are free to do.
34. Any moderately sober reflection on human life and human societies, suggest that we are creatures easily swayed, constantly infected by the opinions of others, lacking critical self understanding, easily gripped by fantastical hopes and ambitions.
35. Democratic politicians may be bad enough, but those sheltering behind a claim to know what is best for us are alt to be alot worse.
36. It takes education and practice in order to become virtuous.
37. The good will is one acting from a particular good motive.
38. The core of morality lies not in what we do but in our motives in doing it:when moral worth is at issue, what counts Is not actions , which one sees, but those inner principles of action that one does not see .
39. Moral excellence is found only in the strength of the sense of duty.
40. An act is wrong if it's performance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any set principles for the general regulation of behaviour that no one could reasonably reject is as bad a basis for informed , uninformed general agreement.
41. The priority of the social and economic order , is to maximize the minimum.
42. Ethical principles are those that would be agreed upon in any reasonable cooperative procedure for coming to one mind about our conduct.
43. Benevolence or concern for humanity is the indispensable root of it all.