Dawkins on Q&A (), replying to a Muslim man who asked about 'absolute morality'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu7AQTs_y5A
“Our basic problem is that we have three levels, I would say, of moral beliefs. We have the first instance, our intuitive moral feelings which are adapted to the small, person-to-person society where we act for people whom we know and are served by people whom we know. Then, we have a society governed by moral traditions which, unlike what modern rationalists believe, are not intellectual discoveries of men who designed them, but as a result of a persons, which I now prefer to describe as term of 'group selection.' Those groups who had accidentally developed such as the tradition of private property and the family who did succeed, but never understood this. So we owe our present extended order of human cooperation very largely to a moral tradition which the intellectual does not approve of, because it has never been intellectually designed and it has to compete with a third level of moral beliefs, those which the morals which the intellectuals designed in the hope that they can better satisfy man's instincts than the traditional morals to do. And we live in a world where three moral traditions are in constant conflict, the innate ones, the traditional ones, and the intellectually designed ones, and ultimately, all our political conflicts of this time can be reduced as affected by a conflict between free moral tradition of a different nature, not only of different content.”
in 1985 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11AXDT5824Y with John O'Sullivan
1980s and later
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Friedrich Hayek 79
Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economic… 1899–1992Related quotes
Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Calling All Muslims, Radio Broadcast # 7, p 116
On Community living
Baba Amte's Words of Wisdom
Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)
Richard Dawkins-George Pell Q&A (2012)
The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Detroit, Michigan (12 April 1964)
Context: Islam is my religion, but I believe my religion is my personal business. It governs my personal life, my personal morals. And my religious philosophy is personal between me and the God in whom I believe; just as the religious philosophy of these others is between them and the God in whom they believe. And this is best this way. Were we to come out here discussing religion, we’d have too many differences from the outstart and we could never get together. [... ] If we bring up religion, we’ll be in an argument, and the best way to keep away from arguments and differences, as I said earlier, put your religion at home in the closet. Keep it between you and your God. Because if it hasn’t done anything more for you than it has, you need to forget it anyway.
The Art of Persuasion
Context: It is necessary to have regard to the person whom we wish to persuade, of whom we must know the mind and the heart, what principles he acknowledges, what things he loves; and then observe in the thing in question what affinity it has with the acknowledged principles, or with the objects so delightful by the pleasure which they give him.
Minute on Education http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html (1835)
“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.”
Source: An Ideal Husband