Science Quote by Isaac Asimov

Asimov’s line is a neat little booby trap for the self-satisfied. It flatters your inner ethical person, then yanks the rug: your “sense of morals” might be the very thing blocking “what’s right.” The brilliance is in the distinction. “Morals” here aren’t justice; they’re the personal or tribal rulebook you’ve inherited, the reflexive disgusts and pieties that feel virtuous precisely because they’re familiar. “Right,” by contrast, is positioned as something sturdier: an outcome-based, reality-tested good that may demand breaking etiquette, offending a creed, or abandoning a principle that plays well at dinner parties.

As a scientist and a lifelong popularizer of rationalism, Asimov is smuggling in a method. Moral certainty is treated like a hypothesis you’re too in love with to falsify. The warning isn’t “be immoral”; it’s “don’t confuse your moral identity with moral accuracy.” That’s why the sentence is structured as a prohibition against a feeling, not a code: “sense” is subjective, slippery, easily gamed by ego. People don’t usually block justice because they hate justice; they block it because they’ve renamed comfort as virtue.

The context is mid-20th-century modernity: a world where tradition kept colliding with new knowledge, new social arrangements, and new forms of harm. In that environment, morality-as-heritage can lag behind morality-as-responsibility. Asimov’s provocation asks for moral courage of a particularly unfashionable kind: the willingness to look righteous and still be wrong, then change course anyway.