With more tests, there will be more confirmed cases. It’s not a question of if, but how many. What happens after that — whether or not families are able to afford treatment — is less clear. The coronavirus has not so much exposed America’s health-care disparities as put them in bold lettering, Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at NYU told me. ‘We have a broken health-care system,’ he said, ‘and the virus delights in that fact.’

A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it.

Let me give you the definition of ethics: it is good to maintain life and to further life. It is bad to damage and destroy life. And this ethic, profound and universal, has the significance of a religion. It is religion.

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.

Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life; it is bad to damage and destroy life.

In a general sense, ethics is the name that we give to our concerns for good behavior. We feel an obligation to consider not only our own personal well-being, but also that of others and of human society as a whole.

Ethics thus consist in this, that I experience the necessity of practicing the same reverence for all life as toward my own. Therein I have already the needed fundamental principle of morality: it is good to maintain and cherish life; it is evil to destroy and to check life.

Some philosophers want to find the answers to general and important questions, including questions about ethics and the nature of the good life, without believing that their answers have much to do with the kind of person they themselves turn out to be.

Indeed, the process of imagining the way another individual thinks about, feels in response to, or literally sees the world is a remarkable phenomenon, related to the domains of both intelligence and ethics, but wholly owned by neither.

Moral courage is allied with the other traits that make up character: honesty, deep seriousness, a firm sense of principle, candor, resolution.

Many people who spend an hour a day in physical exercise to keep fit refuse to spend an hour a week in the cultivation of their morals and their ethics.

Once the moral sensibilities of citizens and officials are engaged, they may be less willing to compromise. Issues come to be seen as matters of principle, creating occasions for high-minded statements, unyielding stands, and no-holds-barred opposition.

There are moral fanatics as well as moral sages, and in politics the former are likely to be more vocal than the latter.

As a philosopher, Bloomfield defends virtue ethics, an approach inspired by the ancient Greeks that focuses on moral character. Here, the cardinal virtues—courage, justice, temperance (moderation or restraint) and wisdom—are meant to guide our decision-making processes. They also provide one set of criteria: a person who possesses these qualities might be considered objectively “good.”

No party, no cause, no struggle, however worthy, is ever free from evil. No earthly cause is entirely good. And to believe with absolute certainty that you are ‘on the right side of history,’ or on the right side of a battle between ‘good and evil’ is a dangerous form of idolatry.