Dawkins on: Where do our morals come from? -- Commentary Pt 1/4

In a talk at a Beyond Belief conference, Dawkins claimed that our morals and shifts in the moral zeitgeist came from newspaper editorials, dinner party conversations, congressional votes, court decisions or some composite of these, and not from religious scriptures.

I agree that they do not come from religious texts or the recommendations of holy figures, but I am still in doubt that Dawkins's suggestion about the generation of our morals is better or even on the right track.

Notice, as a first aspect of my critique, that the difference between religious scriptures and dinner party conversation results or above all newspaper editorials and supreme court decisions or important shifts in parliament or law is, in principle, not too high... These are all part of the type "official behavioral recommendations accessible to a multitude of people"....

Even the phenomenon of "cherry-picking" -- an aspect I forgot to mention in the video -- applies to the alternative(s) which Dawkins suggests (he criticizes the cherry-picking when people claim they take their modern moral views from religious scriptures which also recommend, e.g., stoning a person enjoying extra-marital sex): Do you listen to the conversation result at a dinner party of a racist fraternity or at one of liberal leftists? Do you open the editorial of the New York or Washington Times or even of The National Review? Do you look at court sentences in Texas or in California? At highest court decisions in the USA or in Canada?

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[Aldridge517]

The source of our moral values is social interaction. End of discussion.

[Jackies1979]

@Aldridge517 I cannot help smiling about the paradoxical irony of your comment... This is like Otto Apel who was a strong opponent of discussion ethics, rational argumentation, hearing every side and viewpoint, but in his university seminars was monological and dogmatic to a grotesque extent... so even if morals were based on social interaction (which i do not believe), this comment shows how hypocritical many such theorists of this school are...

[Jackies1979]

@Aldridge517 if you had watched the (admittedly) lengthy discussion to the end, you might have heard arguments for the point that social interaction is to morals only what the socket is for electricity or what the milk man is for the nature of milk...

[Aldridge517]

@Jackies1979 Post me a link to the discussion and I'll give my argument for why that metaphor is incorrect. Or better yet it might even enlighten me and I'll end up changing my position (but of course I doubt).

[MrCropper]

Ayn Rand offers an objective, rational basis for ethics based on the necessity of thought for preservation of life. Of source, no system of ethics gets anywhere without assuming some central value. Rand assumes life as the proper value of life, and any given organism should act to preserve its own life.

[college12003]

There is absolutely no viable reason for the belief in any normative code of ethics in the world of Dawkins. (Like it or not, adopt it or not.) Modern atheists, to me, seem just as dogmatic and naive as the theologians. The truly open-minded, skeptical thinkers are quite rare.

[college12003]

You make very credible claims against Dawkins's ethics. I noted several months ago that Dawkin's ethics were on incredibly weak ground. I tend to critique him more regularly on the basis that as a practitioner of naturalistic, materialist, atheism, he cannot make any valid statements on ethics at all, and therefore every mention of ethics from him is entirely ridiculous. We must recognize that if Dawkins is correct about the nature of reality, then we should adopt moral nihilism.

[diesek1nder]

thanks