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?