#justification

It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#justification #wrong #experience

Moral justification is a powerful disengagement mechanism. Destructive conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it in the service of moral ends. This is why most appeals against violent means usually fall on deaf ears. ↗

— Albert Bandura

#against #appeals #conduct #deaf #destructive

Government, which does not and did not grant us our rights, must not now seek to deny them by using fear as its justification. ↗

— Malcolm Wallop

#did #does #fear #government #grant

This is true only because the purposes and objectives of the Committee for Industrial Organization find economic, social, political and moral justification in the hearts of the millions who are its members and the millions more who support it. ↗

— John L. Lewis

#committee #economic #find #hearts #industrial

One of the main arguments that I make is that although almost everyone accepts that it is morally wrong to inflict “unnecessary” suffering and death on animals, 99% of the suffering and death that we inflict on animals can be justified only by our pleasure, amusement, or convenience. For example, the best justification that we have for killing the billions of nonhumans that we eat every year is that we enjoy the taste of animal flesh and animal products. This is not an acceptable justification if we take seriously, as we purport to, that it is wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering or death on animals, and it illustrates the confused thinking that I characterize as our “moral schizophrenia” when it comes to nonhumans. A follow-up question that I often get is: “What about vivisection? Surely that use of animals is not merely for our pleasure, is it?” Vivisection, Part One: The “Necessity” of Vivisection | Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach http://bit.ly/ol179F ↗

— Gary L. Francione

#ethical #health #justification #moral #personhood

It's only when we understand [Jesus'] presence in the church as being the fulfillment of God's promise in Zephaniah 3:17 to "quiet you with his love" and "rejoice over you with singing" that a crucial aspect of our salvation comes into perspective. Jesus didn't coldly settle accounts for us. He doesn't bark us into improving ourselves. He united us to himself in the glorious communion he has enjoyed for eternity with his heavenly Father. He resides within us to heal the broken places and refresh cauterized hearts. He sings us into a new mode of existence.... When, as Paul does, we imagine Jesus singing nations into submission to his rule, our hearts come joyfully under the sway of a love that is infinite and powerful. ↗

— Reggie M. Kidd

#justification #obedience #righteousness #song #imagination

Bonhoeffer examined and dismissed a number of approaches to dealing with evil. "Reasonable people," he said, think that "with a little reason, they can pull back together a structure that has come apart at the joints." Then there are the ethical "fanatics" who "believe that they can face the power of evil with the purity of their will and their principles." Men of"conscience" become overwhelmed because the "countless respectable and seductive disguises and masks in which evil approaches them make their conscience anxious and unsure until they finally content themselves with an assuaged conscience instead of a good conscience." They must "deceive their own conscience in order not to despair." Finally there are some who retreat to a "private virtuousness. Such people neither steal, nor murder,nor commit adultery, but do good according to their abilities. but... they must close their eyes and ears to the injustice around them. Only at the cost of self-deception can they keep their private blamelessness clean from the stains of responsible action in the world. In all that they do, what they fail to do will not let them rest. ↗

— Eric Metaxas

#dealing-with-evil #ethics #injustice #moral-responsibility #self-justification

Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty. ↗

— Mario Vargas Llosa

#enough #eroticism #individual #justification #me

The talent for self-justification is surely the finest flower of human evolution, the greatest achievement of the human brain. When it comes to justifying actions, every human being acquires the intelligence of an Einstein, the imagination of a Shakespeare, and the subtlety of a Jesuit. ↗

— Michael Foley

#age

Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her— that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side. ↗

— George Eliot

#self-justification #anger