“Kant postulates God, since without this hypothesis morality is unintelligible. We postulate a society specifically distinct from individuals, since otherwise morality has no object and duty no roots.”

Sociology and philosophy (1911), D. Pocock, trans. (1974), p. 51.

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Émile Durkheim43

French sociologist (1858-1917) 1858–1917

John E. Hare (1949) British philosopher

Source: “Ethics and Religion: Two Kantian Arguments” (2011), p. 165

“Continental morality critics are plainly not without ethical views of their own—namely, views, broadly, about the good life for (some or all) human beings—since it is on the basis of these views that they criticize “morality.” Therefore, we need to understand the contours of the “morality” to which these critics object—for ease of reference, we will call it “morality in the pejorative sense” (MPS)—since it must be distinguished from the normative considerations that inform their critiques. … We can usefully divide Continental critics of morality into two camps … In the first camp are those thinkers who see the individual’s acceptance of morality as such as an obstacle to the individual’s flourishing; in very different ways, Nietzsche and Freud are these kinds of morality critics. In the second camp are those philosophers who see morality as among the “ideological” instruments that sustain socio-economic relations that are obstacles to individual flourishing. On this second account—most obviously represented by Marx and perhaps some of his descendants associated with the Frankfurt School.”

Brian Leiter (1963) American philosopher and legal scholar

“Morality Critics”

“H. A. Lorentz has found out the Relativity theorem and has created the Relativity postulate as a hypothesis that electrons and matter suffer contractions in consequence of their motion according to a certain law. A. Einstein has brought out the point very clearly, that this postulate is not an artificial hypothesis but is rather a new way of comprehending the time-concept, which is forced upon us by observation of natural phenomena.”

Hermann Minkowski The Fundamental Equations for Electromagnetic Processes in Moving Bodies

The Fundamental Equations for Electromagnetic Processes in Moving Bodies (1907)

“We must abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security — and indeed to continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use.”

Mohamed ElBaradei (1942) Egyptian law scholar and diplomat, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Nobel …

Saving Ourselves From Self-Destruction (2004)
Context: We must abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security — and indeed to continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use.
Similarly, we must abandon the traditional approach of defining security in terms of boundaries — city walls, border patrols, racial and religious groupings. The global community has become irreversibly interdependent, with the constant movement of people, ideas, goods and resources. In such a world, we must combat terrorism with an infectious security culture that crosses borders — an inclusive approach to security based on solidarity and the value of human life. In such a world, weapons of mass destruction have no place.

“There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.”

Jorge Luis Borges book The Immortal

"The Immortal" (1949)

“Since (from the same root as umma) to lead us toward that objective].”

Ali Shariati (1933–1977) Iranian academic and activist

Ali Shariati, in: The Islamic Quarterly, Vol. 27-29, (1983), p. 215.

“We can tell murder is wrong because we have objective criteria by which we can determine for certain whether murder is wrong, and we can do that regardless of what mood the gods are in nowadays. There has to be an objectively verifiable reason why something is moral or immoral, or else no one could know whether it is, including God, since the Bible has Him changing His mind all the time. Without that criteria, you couldn't know what is moral or immoral either; you just have to trust whatever the people said who pretended to speak for God.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, The Damn Commandments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u3z69YpLx0 (January 7, 2015)

“This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.”

William James Is Life Worth Living?

"Is Life Worth Living?"
1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

“All the migrations postulated by Renfrew ultimately stem from a single catalyst: the crossing of Anatolian farmers into Greece… For all practical purposes, Renfrew’s hypothesis disregards Tocharian and Indo-Iranian.”

Colin Renfrew (1937) British archaeologist

Heaven, Heroes and Happiness: The Indo-European Roots of Western Ideology by Shan M.M. Winn, University Press of America, Lanham-New York-London, 1995. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

“Since society is only a group of individuals interacting according to their various purposes and plans, society has no ‘good’ apart from that of the units of which it is composed.”

Roy A. Childs, Jr. (1949–1992) American libertarian essayist and critic

"The Epistemological Status of the Issue,” 1971-72

“Kant postulates God, since without this hypothesis morality is unintelligible. We postulate a society specifically distinct from individuals, since otherwise morality has no object and duty no roots.”

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Émile Durkheim43

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