“Anything that is moral for a group to do is moral for one person to do.”
There must be a flaw in that, since I’ve always been taught that it is wrong to take the law in your own hands. But I can’t find the flaw and it sounds axiomatic, self-evident. Switch it around. If something is wrong for one person to do, can it possibly be made right by having a lot of people (a government) agree to do it together? Even unanimously?
If anything is wrong, it is wrong—and vox populi can’t change it.
Source: Podkayne of Mars (1963), Chapter 13 (p. 169)
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Robert A. Heinlein557
American science fiction author 1907–1988Related quotes
Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast #36 [@2:32:37]
Podcast
“Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons!”
Thomas Hardy book Jude the Obscure
Pt. VI, ch. III
Jude the Obscure (1895)
John Varley (1947) American science fiction author
"The Persistence of Vision", The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (March 1978), reprinted as the title story in The Persistence of Vision (1978)
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate
in 1985 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11AXDT5824Y with John O'Sullivan <br class="br">1980s and later
John Stuart Mill book Utilitarianism
Source: Utilitarianism (1861), Ch. 2
Context: In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.