"Moral obligation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... perseverance,—more of depth than width.[27] The moral conditions under which he lived were the love, the pursuit, and the practice of truth in everything; strength and depth, rather than external warmth of affection; fidelity to principles and to friends. He used often to speak of the moral obligation laid upon every man to think truly, as well as to speak and act truly, and said that much intellectual demoralization and ruin resulted from neglecting this. He was absolutely tolerant of all difference of opinion, so ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... inclinations, and as these rest on physical causes, they can never of themselves coincide with the moral law, the sources of which are quite different; and therefore they make it necessary to found the mental disposition of one's maxims on moral obligation, not on ready inclination, but on respect, which demands obedience to the law, even though one may not like it; not on love, which apprehends no inward reluctance of the will towards the law. Nevertheless, this latter, namely, love to the law (which would then cease to be ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... literary institution should be a safe resort, and no other advantages will, in the common estimation, compensate for defect and failure in this particular. The relations which every individual student sustains to God and to eternity, call imperiously and aloud, that the great principles of moral obligation, the everlasting distinctions between right and wrong, the methods of the Divine administration, and the solemnities of eternal retribution, should be kept before him, in all their significancy, and enforced by the constraining motives of the gospel of Jesus Christ, without which ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... long ago by Aristotle, the suicide wrongs the state rather than himself. Where a man is still able to do any service to the state, in either a private or a public capacity, he is under a social, and, therefore, a moral obligation to perform that service, and, consequently, to withdraw from it by a voluntary death is to desert the post of duty. This consideration, of course, holds only where a man's life is still of value to society, but it should be ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... Still, perhaps, the fiction of kinship is maintained. All the citizens of Athens are regarded as members of the same great tribe or family. But even in the time of Plato, whom we are accustomed to look upon as one of the great teachers of the world, there was no thought of any moral obligation to anybody who lived in Sparta, lived in any other city of Greece, and less was there any thought of moral obligation as touching or taking in the outside barbarian. So when the city grew into a nation, and we came to a point where ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... Naturae, 1672) turns to experience with the questions, In what does morality consist? Whence does it arise? and What is the nature of moral obligation? and finds these answers: Those actions are good, or in conformity to the moral law of nature, which promote the common good (commune bonum summa lex). Individual welfare must be subordinated to the good of all, of which it forms ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... solution was so simple. Eliza's desire to have Freddy in the house with her seemed of no more importance than if she had wanted an extra piece of bedroom furniture. Pleas as to Freddy's character, and the moral obligation on him to earn his own living, were lost on Higgins. He denied that Freddy had any character, and declared that if he tried to do any useful work some competent person would have the trouble of undoing it: a procedure ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... inwardly determined not to swear. A man might fight a duel, if in danger of being stigmatized as a coward; he might betray his friend, if he could thus benefit his party. The Jesuits invented a system of casuistry which confused all established ideas of moral obligation. They tolerated, and some of them justified, crimes, if the same could be made subservient to the apparent interests of the church. Their principle was to do evil that good might come. Above all, they conformed to the inclinations of the great, especially to those of absolute princes, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... come within your line of duty, and devolves rather upon the minister of war; and very possibly he would object to executing such a commission; for how could I step forward as the protector of one who would shake off the moral obligation of an oath directly it suits his inclinations to doubt its legality? This affair gives me great uneasiness, and involves the most serious consequences. You will see that I shall be overwhelmed with petitions and pamphlets, ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... his intimates cannot explain the reason of their obedience to him. After a brief acquaintance he is revealed as the very soul of insincerity—he "works" his friends, he pays toll to his enemies, he frankly shows himself without the sense of moral obligation. I believe his talent resides in his capacity to select the proper type of man to "make rich" in the illicit schemes his abnormal mind conceives. These coworkers of his are of different grades; some have a super-abundance of cash; ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... true, is not the highest trait of statesmanship. Crises often arise in the conduct of National affairs when cherished opinions must be sacrificed and new departures taken. But this necessity can never apply to that class of political questions closely and inseparably allied with moral obligation. Mr. Seward had himself taught the nation that conflict on questions involving the rights of human nature is irrepressible. The slavery against which he had warred so long and so faithfully had been abolished in vain if another ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... added, under masters publicly nominated. But from the very circumstance of compulsory education at that age, and the absence of it in childhood, we may suppose that there had already grown up in Athens a moral obligation and a general custom, to prepare the youth of the state ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... readily perceive how scruples of conscience must have arisen in a soil well prepared to receive them—how the loss of his children must have appeared as a judicial sentence on a violation of the Divine law. The divorce presented itself to him as a moral obligation, when national advantage combined with superstition to encourage what he secretly desired; and if he persuaded himself that those public reasons, without which, in truth and fact, he would not have stirred, ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... place, we may observe that the people of Rome in that age were generally more corrupt by many degrees than has been usually supposed possible. The effect of revolutionary times, to relax all modes of moral obligation, and to unsettle the moral sense, has been well and philosophically stated by Mr. Coleridge; but that would hardly account for the utter licentiousness and depravity of Imperial Rome. Looking back to Republican Rome, and considering ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... excuses, and more mendacious promises. He is tempted to elude responsibility; to delay settlements; to prevaricate upon the terms; to resist equity, and devise specious fraud. When the eager creditor would restrain such vagrancy by law, the debtor then thinks himself released from moral obligation, and brought to a legal game, in which it is lawful for the best player to win. He disputes true accounts; he studies subterfuges; extorts provocatious delays; and harbors in every nook, and corner, and passage, of the law's labyrinth. ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... 10 Met., decided in 1845, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts followed the decision in Battiste's case, and held that the jury are under a moral obligation to decide the case as instructed by the court, and the court sum up the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... cases at present, upholding school boards in their denial of this right. Contracts which prevent women teachers from marrying or discontinuing their work for marriage should be illegal, and talk about the "moral obligation" of normal school graduates ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... by deceit, and I will throw him off in the face of day," returned Lady Levison. "There is no moral obligation why I should not. He has worked ill and ruin—ill and ruin upon me and my child, and the world shall never be allowed to think I have borne my share in it. How was it you kept your hands off him, when he reappeared, to brave ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... indebted to his writings than to those of any other uninspired writer, for the insight which I have been enabled to attain into the motives of the Divine Economy and the grounds of moral obligation." ...
— Some Remains (hitherto unpublished) of Joseph Butler, LL.D. • Joseph Butler
... the Federalists was publicly expressed by Josiah Quincy, of Massachusetts, in a Speech in 1811 on the admission of Louisiana: "If this bill passes, it is my deliberate opinion that it is virtually a dissolution of this Union; that it will free the States from their moral obligation; and, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, definitely to prepare for a separation, amicably if they can, violently if ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... Heaven's sake, let him not be incoherent. That would be extremely unpleasant. It was like people talking in their sleep; they always frightened her. And Mrs. Tristram intimated that, taking very high ground as regards the moral obligation which events had laid upon her, she proposed not to rest quiet until she should have confronted him with the least inadequate substitute for Madame de Cintre that the ...
— The American • Henry James
... the white race had produced "a very high-class half-caste," mixture with the Chinese a "very desirable type," but the union of black and "Melanesian types ... produces a very undesirable citizen." The (p. 111) Marine Corps, Maj. Gen. Charles F. B. Price continued, had a special moral obligation and a selfish interest in protecting the population of American Samoa, especially, from intimacy with Negroes; he strongly urged therefore that any black units deployed to the Pacific should be sent to Micronesia where they ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... may be questioned whether Johnson was entirely in the right. I suppose it will not be controverted that the difference in the degree of criminality is very great, on account of consequences: but still it may be maintained, that, independent of moral obligation, infidelity is by no means a light offence in a husband; because it must hurt a delicate attachment, in which a mutual constancy is implied, with such refined sentiments as Massinger has exhibited in his play of The Picture.—Johnson probably at ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... himself; he annuls my parole by putting guards upon me, for, as we used to say at Mareschal-College, FIDES ET FIDUCIA SUNT RELATIVA [See Note I]; and if he does not trust my word, I do not see how I am bound to keep it, if any motive should occur for my desiring to depart from it. Surely the moral obligation of the parole is relaxed, in as far as physical force ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... work that no glory of physical science can equal, and no instrument of physical science can compass, in purifying men's appetites, in setting discipline and direction on their lives, and in offering to humanity new types of moral obligation and fairer ideals of saintly perfection, whose light still shines like a star to guide our own poor voyages. It is only by this contemplation of the life of our race as a whole that men see the beginnings and the ends of things; learn not to be near-sighted in history, but to look before and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley
... justice, mercy, benevolence, unselfishness, love. The human mind arrives at ethical truths, even when all speculation about God and immortality has failed. The idea of God may be lost, but not that of moral obligation,—the mutual social duties of mankind. There is a sense of duty even among savages; in the lowest civilization there is true admiration of virtue. No sage that I ever read of enjoined immorality. No ignorance can prevent the sense of shame, of honor, or of duty. Everybody detests a liar and despises ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... realization of its program on these matters may be justifiable; on the other hand, loyalty to party in local politics may be an evil. There is no Democratic way of cleaning a street, and no Republican method of fighting a fire. Thus the same citizen who may be under a moral obligation to support some party in National and state politics, may be under a similar obligation to make his choice of local candidates independent of party. A desirable development, in this regard, is the recent tendency for some municipal elections to be decided regardless ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... She always-her large, loving eyes glowing with the kindness of her soul-heard Marston say they were just as free as people could be, and they should be free, too! Some people did'nt look at the moral obligation of the thing. Here, the good lady, blushing, draws the veil over her face. There is something more she would like to disclose if ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... Maria Bertram was beginning to think matrimony a duty; and as a marriage with Mr. Rushworth would give her the enjoyment of a larger income than her father's, as well as ensure her the house in town, which was now a prime object, it became, by the same rule of moral obligation, her evident duty to marry Mr. Rushworth if she could. Mrs. Norris was most zealous in promoting the match, by every suggestion and contrivance likely to enhance its desirableness to either party; and, among other means, by seeking an intimacy with the gentleman's mother, who at present ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... all ethical science and is complete. To add to it, or take from it, would change the rule. Then, the solution to all ills must be measured by that sense of conscience unimpaired, emanating from that innate rule of human duty based upon moral obligation. ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... having created this model hospital, that some day through lack of support its doors should close and the wounded you have taken in be turned over to others; certainly those first subscribers undertook a sort of moral obligation to themselves not to permit the work to fail. But, none the less, it is admirable that it should be so. To give once is something, but it is little if one compares the value of the first ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... care for keeping, faith for faith. It is a matter of the future, not of the past. What a poor soul it is that has not some secret chamber, sacred to itself; where one can file away the things others have no right to know, as well as things that one himself would fain forget! We are under no moral obligation to inflict upon others the history of our past mistakes, our wayward thoughts, our secret sins, our desperate hopes, or our heartbreaking disappointments. Still less are we bound to bring out from this secret chamber the ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... had always interested him. As a speculation in moral obligation, he adopted Peter Castle's orphan, who turned to him in a passion of gratitude and blind devotion. And as she bade fair to rival her dead mother in beauty, and as rich men marry beauty when it is in the market, the Hon. John Garcide decided to control the child's future. A promise ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... system, Godward, is fatalism,—manward, indifferentism and negation of moral good and evil. Leibnitz ends in theism; the moral result of his system, Godward, is optimism,—manward, liberty, personal responsibility, moral obligation. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... property. If you have the impudence to persevere in mis-naming this "love," supply any one instance in which you use the word in this sense? If your son did not spit in your face, because he believed that you would disinherit him if he did, and this were his main moral obligation, would you allow that your son loved you—and with all his heart, and mind, and ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... daughters of foolishness, to those in whom their life was still green—Donec virenti canities abest!—Donec virenti canities abest! Marius could hardly doubt how Cornelius would have taken the call. And as for himself, slight as was the burden of positive moral obligation with which he had entered Rome, it was to no wasteful and vagrant affections, such as these, that his Epicureanism had ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... what is the interest of imagination? It is to emancipate itself from all laws, and to play its part freely. The obligation imposed on the will by the moral law, which prescribes its object in the strictest manner, is by no means favorable to this need of independence. And as the moral obligation of the will is the object of the moral judgment, it is clear that in this mode of judging, the imagination could not find its interest. But a moral obligation imposed on the will cannot be conceived, except by supposing this same will absolutely independent of the moral instincts and from ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... for he knew not in what manner Coleridge had latterly spoken of him. But I continued all possible offices of kindness to his children, long after I regarded his own conduct with that utter disapprobation which alone it can call forth from all who had any sense of duty and moral obligation. ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... obvious and so neglected; even the religious sentiment awakened by the conscience so dividing itself from the moral instinct! the dread of being thought less religious by obscure comparative strangers stronger than the moral obligation to discover and reclaim the child for whose errors, if she had erred, the mother who so selfishly forsook her was alone responsible! even at the last, at the approach of death, the love for a name she had ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... control and supervision, the guiding mind of the mistress will make itself felt in every department of the household without any undue worry to herself. The mistress of a small household who has things more under her immediate control, and whose income, no less than her sense of moral obligation, obliges her to look carefully after the outgoings, need not be told what a trial it is to be constantly on the watch to prevent waste. Probably she is compelled to leave a certain quantity of stores for general use; indeed, we doubt very much if there is anything saved ...
— Nelson's Home Comforts - Thirteenth Edition • Mary Hooper
... question arises thus: Justice is a virtue; temperance is a virtue; and so forth. Now, what is the common principle which ranks these several species under the same genus? What, in the language of logicians, is the common differential principle which determines these various aspects of moral obligation to a common genius? Another question, and a more interesting question to men in general, is this,—What is the motive to virtue? By what impulse, law, or motive, am I impelled to be virtuous rather than vicious? Whence is the motive derived ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... anything. But this same power and majesty, carelessly presented, may call out fear, not the godly sort that is afraid of grieving Him by sin, but the physical fear that casts out love. He does not have the sense of moral obligation to God, for that again goes into the abstraction of thought. His religious life begins in feeling, pure and simple, and his creed is in I John, "We love Him because He first ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... have believed I was such a fool," said Gammon to himself at a late hour. He meant, of course, that experience was teaching him for the first time the force of a moral obligation, which, as theorist, he had always held mere matter for joke. He by no means prided himself on this newly-acquired perception; he saw it only as an obstacle to business-like behaviour. But it was there, and—by jorrocks! the ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... it's inhuman to take no interest in our welfare. It wouldn't kill a Head to give up a night a month to ask us to meet possible friends, or to write a few letters of introduction. You agree with me in your heart, so it's no use pretending. It's a moral obligation, if it isn't legal, and I say part of the responsibility is hers if things go wrong. It's inhuman to leave a young girl alone in lodgings without even troubling to inquire if she has anywhere to go in her leisure ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... to one: in short, there was an impossibility in the circumstances of doing otherwise than what he had done. But then the same impossibility—the same circumstances—might recur the next night, and the next, and so on: the peremptory temper of King Corny was not likely to alter, and the moral obligation of gratitude would continue the same; so that at nineteen was he to become, from complaisance, what his soul and body abhorred—an habitual drunkard? And what would become of Lady Annaly's interest in his fate or ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... enthusiasts or morose devotees, who are incommodious to themselves, vexatious to others: men without principle, who quickly pour the waters of Lethe over the terrors with which they have been disturbed; who know no moral obligation, who respect no virtue. Thus superstition, elevated above every thing else, held forth the fanatical dogma, "Better to obey the gods than men;" in consequence, man believed he must revolt against his prince, detach himself from his wife, detest his children, estrange himself from his friends, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... what ought to be done, moral obligation, accountableness^, liability, onus, responsibility; bounden duty, imperative duty; call, call of duty; accountability. allegiance, fealty, tie engagement &c (promise) 768; part; function, calling &c (business) 625. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the conversation between the President and Senator Harding about the distinction between "legal" and "moral" obligations, which was interesting at the time, takes on an added interest. Said Senator Harding: "If there is nothing more than a moral obligation on the part of any member of the league, what avail articles X ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... go out year after year disbelieving totally in the possibility of arriving at any fundamental "truth" whatever, even in ethics. Several years ago, the then President of the Harvard "Philosophical Club" said in my hearing that he "saw no ground of moral obligation anywhere in the universe"; and this declaration was apparently assented to by every one of the fifteen or twenty members present. This very last summer, a recent graduate told me that he left college bewildered, depressed, and "disheartened," because he saw nowhere any ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... reproduced the rumors, which were subsequently publicly refuted in the Boston Herald, by Mr. Webster's able biographer, George Ticknor Curtis. The friends of Mr. Webster would have been false to his memory and their own moral obligation had they failed to put forward the evidence in their possession to disprove the charges on which such rumors were fabricated, and which, until a few years ago, had not found a place, so far as I know, in any ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... obligation to take advantage of the means for the future benefit of his children is a moral obligation placed upon the shoulders of the individual parent. It becomes a legal obligation only when, and in so far as, the moral obligation is not realised by a certain number of the community. Certainly one reason for the making of the education of a man's ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... interest; and, then, whether life in this world is the only life of which we shall ever be conscious. It is true of most people that when they are talking of evolution, and the origin of species, and the experiential or intuitional source of ideas, and the utilitarian or transcendental basis of moral obligation, these are the questions which they really have in their minds. Now, in spite of the scientific activity of the day, nobody is likely to contend that men are pressed keenly in their souls by any poignant stress of spiritual tribulation in the ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... If, for example, under the restricted Utopian scheme of inheritance, a man inherited sufficient money to release him from the need to toil, he would be free to go where he pleased and do what he liked. A certain proportion of men at ease is good for the world; work as a moral obligation is the morality of slaves, and so long as no one is overworked there is no need to worry because some few are underworked. Utopia does not exist as a solace for envy. From leisure, in a good moral and intellectual atmosphere, come experiments, come ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... never dreamed of being required at her hands. This method of living upon their neighbours is a most convenient one to unprincipled people, as it does not involve the penalty of stealing; and they can keep the goods without the unpleasant necessity of returning them, or feeling the moral obligation of being grateful for their use. Living eight miles from —-, I found these constant encroachments a heavy burden on our poor purse; and being ignorant of the country, and residing in such a lonely, out-of-the-way place, surrounded by these ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... men are released from obedience to God's requirements has weakened the force of moral obligation, and opened the flood-gates of iniquity upon the world. Lawlessness, dissipation, and corruption are sweeping in upon us like an overwhelming tide. In the family, Satan is at work. His banner waves, even in professedly Christian households. There is envy, evil surmising, hypocrisy, ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White |
