"According to Aristotle, human beings are political animals; that they are social is more significant than that they are individual. In his view ethics is a branch of politics. The character of the social worlds in which we live is, from a moral point of view, prior to the character of our individual moral choices. The character of our social worlds informs, shapes, enables our individual moral development. Questions of ethics are, in a central dimension, questions of politics and social criticism." [Michael Novak, The Social World of Individuals, 2(3) Hastings Ctr. Studies 37 (September, 1974)]

"Moral pluralism is not the cause of the problems we face in making sense of how we should conduct our lives and our public affairs. And moral absolutism is not the cure for our problems. The core of the problems lies, on the contrary, in the cultural over generalization of individualism to represent a sort of moral Esperanto. How to redress the moral imbalance this creates is the key question we face, for the effect of this over generalization in an institutionally differentiated society is to garble and cut off a cultural conversation that embraces other modes of moral discourse and more traditional perspectives on life's meaning. The over generalization of individualism's utilitarian and expressive languages is institutionally grounded in our experience of the instrumentally organized, procedurally regulated bureaucracies of a corporate economy and administrative state, coupled with the expressive fulfillments of middle-class leisure and romance. But these institutions do not comprise the whole of our lives or our social order." [Steven M. Tipton, The Church As A School For Virtue, 117 Daedalus 163 , ___ (1988)]

"Let it be said that when we encounter thoughts that seem unintelligible, the fault may not be ours. . . . Sometimes obscurity is really the best that can be achieved in an honest effort to express subtle and elusive truth. . . . Any effort to give voice to our deepest feelings and thoughts is liable to be unavoidably vague at times. Truth is greater than both our thoughts and our language." [Daniel C. Maguire, The Moral Choice 37, 39 (New York: Doubleday, 1978)]

"Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take in the time ahead or what use it will make of our anguished searching. The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something--an object or ourselves--and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force." [Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death 285 (New York: MacMillan, 1973)]

"Can we really relate the various aspects of our lives in any way that makes moral sense? The proposal that we might try to is bound to surprise people brought up on the idea that it simply is not possible to think effectively at all about problems of value. . . . It is not that people have really given up trying to deal intelligently with their moral problems, and certainly not that they have stopped arguing about them. In practice, we all constantly have to make choices about priorities--about the general direction in which life ought to go--and we use our heads in dealing with these choices as we do over any others. But we tend to quail at the idea that these choices commit us to come kind of general moral reasoning about what matters. We have been trained to talk as if valid reasoning is only possible inside certain narrow professional limits, primarily those of `science'. We therefore often use a mask of general scepticism to avoid liability for our informal thoughts. We declare moral bankruptcy in advance." [Mary Midgley, Wisdom, Information and Wonder: What is Knowledge For? 34 (New York: Routledge, 1991)]

"What is new about our present situation is that our best moral wisdom can conceive of no alternative. We seem able only to suggest ways to make the game more nearly fair. We are unable to provide an account of morality worthy of requiring ourselves and others to suffer and thus releasing us from the prison of our own interests." [Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics 9 (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983)]

"In examining the knowledge of those around him, Socrates found not only were people making false claims to knowledge, but that these claims prohibited them from thinking critically. His task was then to purge people of their opinions, that is, of unexamined prejudgments that would prevent them from conducting an inquiry. Thus, Socrates's task was to bring others to an acknowledgment of their ignorance." [Larry Churchill, The Teaching of Ethics and Moral Values in Teaching: Some Contemporary Confusions, 53 J. Higher Educ. 296, 305 (1982)]

Changing Minds