If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, your church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind or generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of tabu morality, and has done untold harm.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Russell criticizes moral systems that reward abstention from major sins while ignoring positive deeds, calling it inadequate and harmful.
- In plain terms
- Moral praise for just not doing bad things ignores the value of doing good.
- What can you take from it?
- True virtue includes positive actions, not just avoidance of wrongdoing.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- How can we balance discouraging harm with encouraging good?
- What metrics should define moral merit?
Another view
Some societies may lack mechanisms to reward positive deeds equally.
More from Bertrand Russell
Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
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