“There is no moral authority for government other than to enforce the Universal Ethic.”

— Fred E. Foldvary

Source: The Soul of Liberty (1980), p. 103

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "There is no moral authority for government other than to enforce the Universal Ethic." by Fred E. Foldvary?

Fred E. Foldvary 4

American economist 1946

Related quotes

“If the ethical – that is, social morality – is the highest … then no categories are needed other than the Greek philosophical categories.”

Sören Kierkegaard book Fear and Trembling

Fear and Trembling, p. 55
1840s, Fear and Trembling (1843)

“Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.”

John Ralston Saul book The Unconscious Civilization

Source: The Unconscious Civilization

“Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe.”

Hans Morgenthau book Politics Among Nations

Six Principles of Political Realism, § 5.
Politics Among Nations (1948)
Context: Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe. As it distinguishes between truth and opinion, so it distinguishes between truth and idolatry. All nations are tempted — and few have been able to resist the power for long — to clothe their own aspirations and action in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another. There is a world of difference between the belief that all nations stand under the judgment of God, inscrutable to the human mind, and the blasphemous conviction that God is always on one's side and that what one wills oneself cannot fail to be willed by God also.

“Admit their maxims, and the universe returns to a frightful chaos; all things are thrown into disorder upon the earth; all the notions of virtue and vice are overthrown; the most inviolable laws of society are abolished: the discipline of morality is swept away; the government of states and empires ceases to be subject to any rule; the whole harmony of political institutions is dissolved; and the human race becomes an assemblage of madmen, barbarians, cheats, unnatural wretches who have no other laws but force, no other curb than their passions and the dread of authority, no other tie than irreligion and independence, no other gods than themselves.”

Jean Baptiste Massillon (1663–1742) French Catholic bishop and famous preacher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 348.

“Ethics must not remain a lovely abstraction; it must be concretized into valid truth. At this point ethics joins forces with religion because ethics too has ultimately no other recourse but to hypothesize the idea of God: not for the personal redemption of the moral individual but as a guarantee for the eventual realization of morality in this world.”

Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) German philosopher

Source: Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen (1971), p. 122

“It is not appropriate for people to talk about morals and ethics when they cannot put the value of morals and ethics on themselves.”

Titon Rahmawan

“The ethic of Reverence for Life is the ethic of Love widened into universality.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Epilogue, p. 235 http://books.google.com/books?id=jHuYuLugqBAC&q=%22The+ethic+of+Reverence+for+Life+is+the+ethic+of+Love+widened+into+universality%22&pg=PA235#v=onepage
Out of My Life and Thought : An Autobiography (1933)

“By believing we are the product of random acts, we eliminate morality and the basis of ethical behavior. For if there is no such thing as moral authority, you can do anything you want. You make everything relative, and there’s no reason for any of our higher values.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

As quoted in "Evolution? No" http://archives.adventistreview.org/2004-1509/story2.html, The Adventist Review (2004)

“Perhaps now more than at any other moment in the history of the world, society, government and statesmanship need to be based upon the highest code of morality and ethics. And in political terms, what is the highest code of morality? It is the subordination of everything to the well-being of mankind. But today we are faced with a situation where the well-being of mankind is not always the primary consideration. Many who are in places of high power think, rather, of controlling the world.”

Sukarno (1901–1970) first President of the Republic of Indonesia

Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference

“If we decide – and this is our decision; it’s not imposed on us from above – if we decide that reducing the amount of suffering in the world is a good ethical principle to live by, then it becomes entirely unjustified and arbitrary to extend this principle to human beings but not also to extend it to other animals capable of suffering. Why should the suffering of nonhumans be less important than that of humans? Surely a universe with less suffering is better than one with more, regardless of whether the locus of suffering is a human being or not, a rational being or not, a member of the moral community or not. Suffering is suffering, and these other variables are morally irrelevant.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 274

“There is no moral authority for government other than to enforce the Universal Ethic.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Fred E. Foldvary 4

Related quotes

Related topics