“An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist calls these symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content.”

— Aldo Leopold, book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 202.

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Aldo Leopold130

American writer and scientist 1887–1948

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Source: 1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918), Ch. 6: On the Scientific Method in Philosophy

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Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

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“Every philosophical, ethical, and political idea—its lifeline connecting it with its historical origins having been severed—has a tendency to become the nucleus of a new mythology, and this is one of the reasons why the advance of enlightenment tends at certain points to revert to superstition and paranoia. The majority principle … has become the sovereign force to which thought must cater. It is a new god, not in the sense in which the heralds of the great revolutions conceived it, namely, as a power of resistance to existing injustice, but as a power of resistance to anything that does not conform.”

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“It is the shortcomings of game theory (as originally formulated) which force the consideration of the role of ethics, of the dynamics of social structure, and of social structure and of individual psychology in situations of conflict.”

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Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority”

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“Justice, like Janus, has two faces, one conservative, the other reformative. These two faces are apparent both in the law and in the thought of social and political ethics.”

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