Ethics
Harman has rejected attempts to base moral theory on conceptions of human flourishing and character traits and has expressed skepticism about the need for a good person to be susceptible to moral guilt or shame.
He has argued that there is not a single true morality. In that respect, moral relativism is true. (This sort of moral relativism is not a theory about what ordinary people mean by their moral judgments.)
He has also written about various ways in which values might be explained and has discussed what it is to value something intrinsically.
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Famous quotes containing the word ethics:
“The vanity of the sciences. Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction. But the science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the physical sciences.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)