Word: moral
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...diplomat, arrested last July as a $100-a-night Manhattan call girl (and convicted on evidence obtained by wire-tapping), was let off with a three-month suspended sentence. Said the judge: "The problem of prostitution is not solved in a criminal court. It is a social, economic and moral problem...
...current Partisan Review an article titled "A Parable of Simple Humanity," by Hans Meyerhoff, considers the moral implications of what Dr. Perl did. "Into the struggle she threw her . . . life here and everlasting," he concluded, "[She] risked death and eternal damnation . . . and came to be hailed on behalf of 'simple humanity' at the price of thousands of lives which might have been, but never were and never will be. [She] was right in being what she was by committing this enormous wrong...
...theologians would agree that Dr. Perl's end justified her means. Protestants and Jews have varying views on different kinds of abortion; Roman Catholics say flatly that any abortion is mortal sin. One physician, New York's Dr. David Deutschman, observed: "There is no rational or moral justification for . . . wholesale slaughter of infants . . . whether it be done by the brutal Nazis, or by a sentimental and well-meaning female medical personality...
...largely to blame-a wan and wispy philosopher named Alfred Jules ("Freddie") Ayer. Ayer's book, Language, Truth and Logic, had "acquired almost the status of a philosophic Bible" at Oxford. It insisted that "value judgments" of beauty and goodness were, philosophically speaking, nonsense. They were moral sentiments, not facts at all. Such heresies, "Oxonian" thought, left no place for human values, created the moral void fascism required...
Freddie Ayer thinks that philosophy is scientific in temper, has no business preaching moral or esthetic precepts. There are only two sorts of meaningful statements, he says-those based on observable facts, and those which connect them by logic. In Ayer's philosophy, statements like "There is a God" are neither true nor false, since he regards them as unverifiable. It means nothing to say, "That man is good to support his mother." The fact is that the man supports his mother. Calling him good merely expresses an attitude towards the action...