And further, I will not dissemble my hope, that each person whom I address has felt his own call to cast aside all evil customs, timidities, and limitations, and to be in his place a free and helpful man a reformer … who must find or cut a straight road to everything excellent in the earth, and not only go honorably himself, but make it easier for all who follow him, to go in honor and with benefit.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “Man the Reformer”
Whether a God exist, or whether no God exist, in yon blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate an ethical republic here below. And the first reflection which this leads to is that ethics have as genuine and real a foothold in a universe where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where there is a God as well.
WILLIAM JAMES, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”
At the present time, almost all important ethical problems arise out of the conditions of associated life…. That the present is a time of social change such as have been mentioned is a commonplace; the mere existence alone of democratic government, for example, raises social issues for moral decisions which did not exist for most men and women so long as government was autocratic and confined to a few.
JOHN DEWEY, Ethics
