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“Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.” A philosopher and educator of enormous stature, Confucius. His principles have a strong connection to both East Asian civilization and China's national identity. According to Confucius, individuals who seek to dominate others must develop self-discipline and moral authority. He also felt that education and meditation produced virtue. -
“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
Socrates was a well-known Greek philosopher whose philosophy, character, and view on life had a big influence on Western philosophy. He believes that before anything else, a person should pursue knowledge and wisdom. According to him, knowledge and virtue are related. By achieving knowledge, you can also obtain virtue. -
“Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.”
Greek philosopher Plato is known as Aristotle’s student and then founded his own academy. Plato conforms to a eudaimonistic ethics centered on virtue. For Plato, eudaimonia and arete are the two fundamental concepts of ethics. Plato states that we should all strive towards the virtue of eudaimonia, which is also known as "well-being." -
"Moral virtue is the quality of acting in the best way in relation to pleasures and pains, and that vice is the opposite"
Aristotle, a Greek philosopher, believes that virtue demonstrates one's awareness of and a strong attachment to doing what is morally correct. When presented with moral dilemmas, people are more likely to make the right decision if they practice virtue, based on Aristotle. -
"It is the greatest good to the greatest number which is the measure of right and wrong."
Jeremy Bentham is a philosopher whose name is most closely associated with the foundational era of the modern utilitarian tradition. An ethical theory that contends that morally correct behaviors are those that tend to increase happiness or pleasure for all those they impact, whereas morally wrong actions tend to increase sadness or pain. -
"Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world."
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s deontological theory was based on his conviction that people are rational beings capable of comprehending and applying general moral principles. Deontology is an ethical theory that uses rules to distinguish right from wrong. He believes that people follow the rules and do their duty. This approach tends to fit well with our natural intuition about what is or isn’t ethical. -
"A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury."
John Stuart Mill is a British philosopher and economist, the leading expositor of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is a theory founded on the idea that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness and wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness." -
“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.”
John Rawls was an American philosopher known for his Justice Theory, which defines a society of free people with equal fundamental rights who work together inside a system of egalitarian economics. He also states that, only when the "veil of ignorance" is lifted and people are true equals, they will be forced to make social justice decisions for their society solely using human reason.