
Dawkins on Q&A (), replying to a Muslim man who asked about 'absolute morality'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu7AQTs_y5A
Richard Dawkins-George Pell Q&A (2012)
Dawkins on Q&A (), replying to a Muslim man who asked about 'absolute morality'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu7AQTs_y5A
1960s, "Oral history interview with Donald Judd," 1965
Context: I think most of the art now is involved with a denial of any kind of absolute morality, or general morality. I think most of us in one way or another are involved in ideas of a fairly loose world, however it's expressed, whether obviously as in Chamberlain or just accidentally, or, oh, like Newman.
in 1985 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11AXDT5824Y with John O'Sullivan
1980s and later
Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 12 : The West, Civilizations, and Civilization, § 2 : The Commonalities Of Civilization, p. 319
Context: Does the vacuousness of Western universalism and the reality of global cultural diversity lead inevitably and irrevocably to moral and cultural relativism? If universalism legitimates imperialism, does relativism legitimate repression? Once again, the answer to these questions is yes and no. Cultures are relative; morality is absolute. Cultures, as Michael Walzer has argued, are “thick”; they prescribe institutions and behavior patterns to guide humans in the paths which are right in a particular society. Above, beyond, and growing out of this maximalist morality, however, is a “thin” minimalist morality that embodies “reiterated features of particular thick or maximal moralities.” Minimal moral concepts of truth and justice are found in all thick moralities and cannot be divorced from them. There are also minimal moral “negative injunctions, most likely, rules against murder, deceit, torture, oppression, and tyranny.” What people have in common is “more the sense of a common enemy [or evil] than the commitment to a common culture.” Human society is “universal because it is human, particular because it is a society.” At times we march with others; mostly we march alone. Yet a “thin” minimal morality does derive from the common human condition, and “universal dispositions” are found in all cultures. Instead of promoting the supposedly universal features of one civilization, the requisites for cultural coexistence demand a search for what is common to most civilizations. In a multicivilizational world, the constructive course is to renounce universalism, accept diversity, and seek commonalities.
Part 3 “Four Psycho-Mathematical Arguments”, Chapter 5 “The Gambling Argument (and Emotions from Prudence to Fear)” (p. 139)
Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (2008)
“I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.”
"Atheism Tapes, part 6", BBC TV documentation of Jonathan Miller, produced by Richard Denton, recorded 2003, broadcast 2004
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roFdPHdhgKQ&t=59m29s
Richard Dawkins vs. Jonathan Sacks - BBC's RE:Think Festival (2012)
“Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man’s mental or moral economy.”
What the New Atheists Don't See http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_oh_to_be.html (Autumn 2007).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)