Sentences with phrase «lesser moral evils»

When people speak of «permitting the lesser evil» they may have one or other of a number of different comparisons in mind, either between greater or lesser moral evils, or between what they think of as greater or lesser «pre-moral» evils.

Not exact matches

One can concede that the tendency of two - kingdoms theology to subordinate political concerns to a lesser realm made it easier than it should have been for Lutherans under Hitler to ignore or rationalize the regime's moral evils, but the Nazis» anti-Semitism and their exaltation of the State to idolatrous heights could find no justification in legitimate Lutheran doctrines of morality or church - state relations.

While they write of their qualified moral acceptance of deterrence, they mean only, as Cardinal John Krol testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that they consider deterrence to be for now the lesser of competing evils.

But if a choice between evils is to have any moral meaning at all, one evil will be judged less than another because it involves less destruction of some real good.

There is less concern with evil forces in «the world» and more concern with the battle to achieve moral purity.

Or perhaps for unaccountably complex reasons men find it somehow less disastrous to ascribe the origin of evil to an inherent moral depravity than to an ignorance of our feelings and emotional needs, what Whitehead calls «conceptual prehension.»

In fact, one might suspect that a world in which evil was somewhat less victorious than in our present one would evoke more moral qualities, since many people in the present world give up on the battle for goodness because it often seems so hopeless.

His principal contribution in The Lesser Evil is his insistence that moral reflection should be at the center of the discussion about how to confront terror, but readers should not regard this as the last word in that discussion.

The cause of this uneasiness becomes clearer if we question Ignatieff's argument at several points: the validity of the moral paradigm itself, the assumptions from which he proceeds, the inconsistencies in how he describes the limits to be observed in doing the «lesser evil,» and his conclusions about specific elements of the war on terror.

Participants believed that they are less evil than others, but no more moral than them.

Klein and Epley call this finding «asymmetric self - righteousness,» reflecting the asym - metry that people do not believe they are more moral than others but rather less evil than them.

However, a new study from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business titled «Less Evil Than You: Bounded Self - Righteousness in Character Inferences, Emotional Reactions, and Behavioral Extremes,» to be published in the forthcoming Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Nicholas Epley and Nadav Klein ask whether the extensive research on self - righteousness overlooks an important ambiguity: When people say they are more moral than others, do they mean they are more like a saint than others or lesslike a sinner?

They seem to offend people less than the comparatively inexplicit The Pledge, and I'm sure that's because Penn's film, though not amoral, has no moral centre — no one slapping Evil's wrist on our behalf.

Less antiseptic than the very broad good vs. evil, dark vs. light fantasy - based conflicts of the series, the world of Rogue One is far more complicated, showing us a more realized version of a universe under the thumb of an evil dictatorship and the moral compromises soldiers living and fighting in a war zones might have to make.