People often focus all their mental energies not on discovering the truth, but on concealing it. Such mental activity is the main cause of temptations.
The court’s only goal is to maintain the status quo, which is why it goes after and executes both, those who stand above the general level and want to raise it, and those who stand below it.
It is possible for every practical moral rule to be contradicted by another rule based on the same foundation.
Temperance: should we not eat and become incapable of serving people? Do not kill animals: should we then let ourselves be eaten by them? Do not drink wine: should we then not take communion or not use it for healing purposes? Be chaste: should we then wish to end the human race? Do not resist evil with violence: should we then let a person kill us and others?
The searching for these contradictions shows only that the one doing it does not want to follow moral rules.
It is always the same story: a single person who needs wine for healing purposes is used as an excuse for alcoholism. The fear of ending the human race is used as an excuse for debauchery. An imaginary thug is used as an excuse to kill, execute and imprison.
A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.
— Thoreau
For as long as humans, i.e. rational beings, have existed, they have differentiated between good and evil and made use of the distinctions made by the people before them—they fought evil, they searched for the true, best path and they progressed slowly but relentlessly along this path. And various deceptions have always stood upon this path, blocking people’s way, whose aim was to dissuade them from moving forward and persuade them to keep living as they lived.
I like peasants: they are not educated enough to reason wrongly.
— Montesquieu
One is sometimes surprised to see a person defending the strangest, most irrational positions: religious, political, scientific. Search and you will discover that it is his own position that he is defending.
Whenever complicated reasoning is used to justify a deed, you can be sure that the deed is bad. The decisions of conscience are straightforward and simple.
