Richard Dawkins

[Mr. Tea]

(Your two illustrations seem quite contentious, for example. What if "being gay is bad" is generic and not idiosyncratic)?

Because there have been/still are cultures around the world where gayness is accepted as normal and no-one bats an eyelid at it? Look at ancient Greece!

 

[vimothy]

I can't help but notice that you're avoiding the question, Mr Tea.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Show me a culture where no-one really minds if you just casually kill someone and I'll concede the argument.

 

[vimothy]

But why would that make you concede the argument? That seems like another non sequitur.

What I want to know is: why should we weight generally held rules over idiosyncratic rules when we come to create our own moral or legal code?

 

[Mr. Tea]

I can't help but notice that you're avoiding the question, Mr Tea.

Because it's so obvious as to be hardly worth bothering to answer. A moral injunction such as 'no killing' that virtually everyone - in fact we could probably say everyone who's not severely mentally ill - intuitively agrees with is going to be a better rule on which to predicated a functioning society than one which not everyone agrees with and which is highly contingent on historical accident.

 

[vimothy]

So where we end up is: Some things people just believe, and always have believed, therefore, people are justified in believing them.

 

[Mr. Tea]

So where we end up is: Some things people just believe, and always have believed, therefore, people are justified in believing them.

Got any better ideas?

 

[IdleRich]

This is a very difficult question of course. Whatever you use is gonna have some assumptions. I think that if I were trying to devise a fair legal system then I would probably start with the assumption that people are born roughly the same and that most people feel similarly about things and have as much right as each other to feel content. Yes, this is a huge assumption but I'm not sure I would want to argue that people have different inherent rights - the first bit is of course more contentious.
Given that I would probably think about the things that I don't want other people to do to me eg kill me, attack me etc it seems reasonable to assume that most other people also don't want these things to happen to them so a good start might be to make it illegal for people to do these things to each other against their will. As I'm assuming that everyone has equal rights then these laws should be arrived at by some kind of consensus (I think that follows doesn't it?).
Of course the logical extension of this is only going to arrive at a negative freedom but it's a start. I recognise that what I'm saying could be pretty much summed up as "love they neighbour" or maybe "Do unto others etc" and I have no problem with that as those aspects of Christian morality are not issues with which I disagree.

 

[vimothy]

Hahaha--is that you conceding the argument?

No, I don't have any better ideas.

There are no better ideas--if by ideas we mean "better methods of developing a set of moral standards". So you're in the same boat as the rest of the religious nutjobs, irreligious nutjobs, anti-religious nutjobs, and everyone else on this Godverdomme planet.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Hahaha--is that you conceding the argument?

No, just getting a bit tired of your incessant Devil's-advocacy. I mean, sorry if that's now what it is, but it's what it often looks like from my side of the screen.

 

[vimothy]

Mr Tea: not my intent, so I'll leave it at that.

 

[IdleRich]

Not advancing it as an argument of any kind but it's sort of relevant and it made me laugh - from this week's Private Eye:

Do Britains stilll have a moral compass or have we degenerated into a nation of spivs and scammers? Radio 3's Night Waves invited Times leader-writer Oliver Kamm and John Milbank, a professor of religion and ethics from Nottingham University, to debate the topic two weeks ago.
Milbank lamented that because religious faith had waned "we may indeed be becoming more immoral than anyone else"; Kamm welcomed the decline in religion, since rational enquiry was needed to establish what's good and what's evil. "Professor Milbank is an example of what I mean," he added, "as he's a 9/11 truth campaigner, a conspiracy theorist."
"No I'm not," huffed the professor.
"Oh yes you are" said Kamm.
Milbank was indeed a founder signatory of a conspiracy group called Religious Leaders for 9/11 Truth, though he claims that he has now asked for his name to be removed. As soon as the programme was over he began shouting at the Times pundit, keeping it up all the way along the corridor, and then in the lift, and then as he followed him outside to a waiting car "You're going to be dealt with!" Milbank screamed "You're going to be dealt with!"
Can this really be what the professor of religion and ethics had in mind when asked, near the end of the discussion on Night Waves, how Britains could recover their moral decency? "I think," he had replied, "We've got to start by being gentle with each other..."

 

[droid]

They must've dug deep to find someone who makes Oliver (I love cluster bombs) Kamm look good. He's a despicable c*nt.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Mr Tea: not my intent, so I'll leave it at that.

OK, I accept that that's not what you were trying to do, but I'll give you my reasons for saying it, and maybe you can set me straight on the positions you're arguing from.

The first thing is, whenever I say anything about trying to create a legal code that's better than one based on the whims, prejudices and historical accidents of a single ethnic group thousands of years ago, you immediately challenge me to define "better" and then simply state that since any definition of the word is going to be culturally and personally subjective, the word is basically meaningless since my "better" is different from a Christian fundamentalist's, a Marxist's, a neo-Nazi's or whatever. But are we ever going to get anywhere in a discussion like this if we can't just assume that a liberal society is in some inherent way better than a fascist one, or that a secular regime is - ceteris paribus - probably better than a theocracy? Otherwise it's like trying to have a discussion about maths with someone who insists on deriving the rules of algebra from elementary axioms every time you want to talk about topology or statistics or whatever.

The other thing is the lack of any offered alternative to a legal code based, either explicitly or implicitly, in scripture - which I'm sure you're not actually a fan of any more than I am.

 

[IdleRich]

"They must've dug deep to find someone who makes Oliver (I love cluster bombs) Kamm look good. He's a despicable c*nt."

I'm not sure it makes him look particularly good - it just shows the hypocrisy of one religious person. I won't extrapolate from that but it just provides a bit of light relief to the rest of the debate.
Anyway, I'm still waiting on a reply from anyone. Science cannot (kinda by definition) categorically rule out any religion. And I accept that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy - but can anyone suggest any argument for being able to say anything about these things? And how you weight one over another?
Or more simplistically and specifically, science or reason or whatever cannot rule out Christianity but is there even an iota of an argument of any kind to rule it in?

 

[comelately]

But are ever going to get anywhere in a discussion like this if we can't just assume that a liberal society is in some inherent way better than a fascist one, or that a secular regime is - ceteris paribus - probably better than a theocracy?

What is a liberal society and is an 'end of history' liberal society possible?

I sort of see your point about not really getting anywhere if we're not willing to agree basic definitions. But if the basic definitions are causing a debate to be skewed in one direction, and if in the wider world these skews (arguably) leading to end results that few people would actually want - then is it really illegitimate to point that out?

If someone critiques a position, is the critique not at least likely to be heavily based on its underlying suppositions?

What it comes down to, I think, is - what is 'political debate' for? What does it mean to have political opinions? If the idea is to be persuasive and tasteful, then liberalism is almost inevitably going to win out as an ideology - it all sounds immensely plausible and fluffy. As long as one doesn't think too hard of course, or think about the losers in the wider game - and who really wants to do that?

 

[Mr. Tea]

What it comes down to, I think, is - what is 'political debate' for? What does it mean to have political opinions? If the idea is to be persuasive and tasteful, then liberalism is almost inevitably going to win out as an ideology - it all sounds immensely plausible and fluffy. As long as one doesn't think too hard of course, or think about the losers in the wider game - and who really wants to do that?

I think you're doing liberalism a disservice with this definition - or perhaps confusing liberalism with "liberalism": a sort of depoliticized non-stance that doesn't say much more than "why can't we all just get along?" and has very little to say about serious social issues. I think this position (if you can even call it a position) was a big part of New Labour's laissez-faire multiculturalism, which effectively helped ghettoize immigrant communities by defining them first and foremost by their ethnicity and hanging on the every word of so-called "community leaders", who were almost invariably unelected, frequently clergymen of one stripe or another and often very conservative and socially inward-looking.

And I don't think liberalism is about pleasing all the people all the time - or rather, it shouldn't be - and if it tries, it's bound to fail, since this is of course impossible. Yes, there will be losers in a liberal society, but if those losers are fascists, racists, religious bigots, then...so what? There are limits to tolerance. Intolerance should not be tolerated.

 

[Mr. Tea]

So what I'm trying to distinguish is an active programme for secularization that safeguards people's right to practice religion without encouraging them to think of their faith as defining their cultural identity in toto - as opposed to the default "liberal" position that assumes that as long as we have a "Muslim community" and a "Jewish community" and a "black community" all living in the same country, then we are "multicultural" and can pat ourselves on the back for being all liberal and progressive and stuff.

 

[vimothy]

Mr Tea,

That’s fair enough. I suppose that you may be well right—I’ll guess that you’ll be your own judge of that, though.

FWIW, to me it seems more like you’re claiming that you can prove some theorem but are not willing to share the proof.

Anyway, let’s say that we agree that religion is no basis for a moral code. Why? Well, because it’s completely arbitrary. Why should we care what religion has to say about anything? It’s all “whims, prejudice and historical accidents”. (Nice turn of phrase). Okay, so that suggests that we’re going to replace religion with something that isn’t. Fine so far.

And what are we going to replace religion with? We’re going to replace it with another completely arbitrary set of beliefs. That you find these beliefs more congenial and sympathetic does not equate to their being any less arbitrary. It just means that you’re a man of your time.

“Whims, prejudice and historical accidents”—that’s the same source of all morality, for everybody, forever. We are no different to our ancestors in that respect, though a great many people like to imagine otherwise. (Pretending that we’re at the apex of history is what keeps the modern world spinning, in my view).

 

[Mr. Tea]

It just means that you’re a man of your time.

Well fair enough. I can't really argue against your accusations of arbitrariness, but isn't it better to run a 21st-century society along arbitrary moral lines that are appropriate to the 21st century, rather than along arbitrary moral lines that are appropriate to the Bronze Age?