Immanuel Kant Quotes About Ethics
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In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.
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Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
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Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
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Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being, to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.
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If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.
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The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
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[S]uppose the mind of [a] friend of humanity were clouded over with his own grief, extinguishing all sympathetic participation in the fate of others; he still has the resources to be beneficent to those suffering distress, but the distress of others does not touch him because he is sufficiently busy with his own; and now, where no inclination any longer stimulates him to it, he tears himself out of his deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination, solely from duty.
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Do the right thing because it is right.
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[R]eason is... given to us as a practical faculty, that is, as one that influences the will.
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