After three and a half centuries I have found, for an empirical ethics — Ethics

"The price of freedom is to decide moral and political issues."

"The most optimistic ethics have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man; without failure, no ethics; for a being who, from the very start, would be an exact co-incidence with himself, in a perfect plenitude, the notion of having-to-be would have no meaning. One does not offer an ethics to a God. It is impossible to propose any to man if one defines him as nature, as something given. The so-called psychological or empirical ethics manage to establish themselves only by introducing surreptitiously some flaw within the manthing which they have first defined."

"There is no ethical idea which it [dharma] has not stressed, put in its most ideal and imperative form, enforced by teaching, injunction, parable, artistic creation, formative examples. Truth, honour, loyalty, fidelity, courage, chastity, love, long-suffering, self-sacrifice, harmlessness, forgiveness, compassion, benevolence, beneficence are its common themes, are, in its view, the very stuff of a right human life, the essence of mans dharma. Buddhism, with its high and noble ethics, Jainism, with its austere ideal of self-conquest, Hinduism, with its magnificent examples of all sides of the Dharma, are not inferior in ethical teaching and practice to any religion or system, but rather take the highest rank and have had the strongest effective force."

"Aristotle filled out further details on the foundation laid by Plato, founded the disciplines of logic and metaphysics, elaborated individual and social ethics, and discussed fundamental issues of . The later systems centered around the attempt to find satisfaction in human living by self-control, refined enjoyment, or suspension of judgment of ultimate problems."

"She takes a deep breath. “Whoo. Okay. Tell me how you justify buying a new pair of shoes.” “What?” “When there are starving people in Africa, what kind of person spends two hundred bucks on shoes? See, once you buy into that paradigm, it’s a bottomless pit. You can never feel good about yourself while there’s anybody in the world poor or hungry, which there always is, Jones, and has been since the dawn of time, so you feel guilty and hypocritical all the time. Im consistent. I admit I don’t care. You want me to reassure you that Alpha is ethical, but Im not going to do it, because ethics is bullshit. It’s the spin we put on our lives to justify what we do. I say, be big enough to live without rationalizations.”"

"Its never a matter of ethics versus pragmatism; its a question of which informs the other. Humans have shown themselves capable of almost unlimited imagination and innovation—qualities that could be said to define human beings. People have used this capacity to do both great good and great harm. The point is that when humans set their minds to doing something, its frequently possible. It makes sense to first ask what people want to do and why, from an ethical standpoint, and then get to the pragmatic how-to questions. The very process of asking whats right is how people fill out ethics in praxis, to meet new demands and dilemmas, new social conditions and contexts. Anarchism, then, brings an egalitarian ethics out into the world, making it transparent, public, and shared. It maintains an ethical orientation, while continually trying to put such notions into practice, as flawed as the effort might be. When other people come into contact with this ethical compass, they will hopefully "get it" and incorporate the same values into their lives, because it works. It offers directionality to political involvement and buttresses peoples efforts to remake society. It turns surviving into thriving. Thats the crucial difference between a pragmatic versus ethical impulse: people, in cooperative concert, qualitatively transform one anothers lives."