15 Robert A. Heinlein Quotes on Ethics

Robert A. Heinlein quotes on ethics

28. Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

29. Correct morality can only be derived from what man is - not from what do-gooders and well-meaning aunt Nellies would like him to be.

32. Ben, the ethics of sex is a thorny problem. Each of us is forced to grope for a solution he can live with -- in the face of a preposterous, unworkable, and evil code of so-called 'morals.' Most of us know the code is wrong; almost everybody breaks it. But we pay Danegeld by feeling guilty and giving lip service. Willy-nilly, the code rides us, dead and stinking, an albatross around the neck. You, too, Ben. You fancy yourself a free soul -- and break that evil code. But faced with a problem in sexual ethics new to you, you tested it against that same Judeo-Christian code...so automatically your stomach did flip-flops...and you think that proves you're right and they're wrong. Faugh! I'd as lief use trial by ordeal.

37. I will accept the rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

38. Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws - always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: Please pass this so that I won't be able to so something I know I should stop. Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them for their own good

55. All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can - and must - be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a 'perfect society' on any foundation other than 'Women and children first!' is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly - and no doubt will keep on trying.

66. Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.

89. I don't trust a man who talks about ethics when he is picking my pocket. But if he is acting in his own self-interest and says so, I have usually been able to work out some way to do business with him.

112. 'No man is an island - ' Much as we may feel and act as Individuals, our race is - a single organism, always growing and branching - which must be pruned regularly to be healthy. This necessity need not be argued; anyone with eyes can see that any organism which grows without limit always dies in its own poisons. The only rational question is whether pruning is best done before or after birth. Being an incurable sentimentalist I favor the former of these methods - killing makes me queasy, even when it's a case of 'He's dead and I'm alive and that's the way I wanted it to be.' But this may be a matter of taste. Some shamans think that it is better to be killed in a war, or to die in childbirth, or to starve in misery, than never to have lived at all. They may be right. But I don't have to like it - and I don't.

115. Of all the strange 'crimes' that human beings have legislated out of nothing, 'blasphemy'is the most amazing - with 'obscenity' and 'indecent exposure' fighting it out for second and third place.

124. Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other 'sins' are invented nonsense.

132. The profession of shaman has many advantages. It offers high status with a safe livelihood free of work in the dreary, sweaty sense. In most societies it offers legal privileges and immunities not granted to other men. But it is hard to see how a man who has been given a mandate from on High to spread tidings of joy to all mankind can be seriously interested in taking up a collection to pay his salary; it causes one to suspect that the shaman is on the moral level of any other con man. But it's lovely work if you can stomach it.

155. I now define 'moral behavior' as 'behavior that tends toward survival.' I won't argue with philosophers or theologians who choose to use the word 'moral' to mean something else, but I do not think anyone can define 'behavior that tends toward extinction' as being 'moral' without stretching the word 'moral' all out of shape.

156. Selfishness is the bedrock on which all moral behavior starts and it can be immoral only when it conflicts with a higher moral imperative. An animal so poor in spirit that he won't even fight on his own behalf is already an evolutionary dead end; the best he can do for his breed is to crawl off and die, and not pass on his defective genes.

158. Evolution is a process that never stops. Baboons who fail to exhibit moral behavior do not survive; they wind up as meat for leopards.