Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870–1938) United States federal judge
Other writings, The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928)
The Morals of Economic Irrationalism (1920)
Context: Corporations are in a sense moral monsters; we say they behave as such and we are disposed to treat them as such. The standard of international morality, particularly in matters of commercial intercourse, is on a still lower level. <!--p.3
Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870–1938) United States federal judge
Other writings, The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928)
Leo Tolstoy The Meaning of the Russian Revolution
The Meaning of the Russian Revolution (1906), a work about the 1905 Russian Revolution.
Context: Not only does the action of Governments not deter men from crimes; on the contrary, it increases crime by always disturbing and lowering the moral standard of society. Nor can this be otherwise, since always and everywhere a Government, by its very nature, must put in the place of the highest, eternal, religious law (not written in books but in the hearts of men, and binding on every one) its own unjust, man-made laws, the object of which is neither justice nor the common good of all but various considerations of home and foreign expediency.
Irving Kristol (1920–2009) American columnist, journalist, and writer
Essay in the Wall Street Journal (1978).
1970s
Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution
Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1, p. 8
Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957) American philosopher
The Moral Economy https://books.google.com/books?id=TjdWAAAAMAAJ (1909)
Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic
New Year's Address to the Nation (1990)
Context: The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships.