New Atheism and morality

Richard Dawkins

The author and poet Michael Robbins declares about the morality of new atheist Richard Dawkins:

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Nietzsche’s atheism is far from exultant—he is not crowing about the death of God, much as he despises Christianity. He understands how much has been lost, how much there is to lose. . . . Nietzsche realized that the Enlightenment project to reconstruct morality from rational principles simply retained the character of Christian ethics without providing the foundational authority if the latter. Dispensing with his fantasy of the Übermensch, we are left with his dark diagnosis. To paraphrase the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, our moral vocabulary has lost the contexts from which its significance derived, and no amount of Dawkins-style hand-waving about altruistic genes will make the problem go away. (Indeed, the ridiculous belief that our genes determine everything about human behavior and culture is a symptom of this very problem.) . . . The point is not that a coherent morality requires theism, but that the moral language taken for granted by liberal modernity is a fragmented ruin: It rejects metaphysics but exists only because of prior metaphysical commitments.

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Commenting on New Atheism and morality the Shadow To Light blog declares:

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A veneer of secular morality rooted in subjective preferences hardly counts as “foundational authority,” meaning that Coyne again fails to refute Robbins’s point. In fact, that morality is anchored to such a subjective foundation means that secular morality is not significantly different from a cultural dress code. The “veneer of secular morality” is just a way for the collective to impose order and conformity on a population of individuals. And if secular morality is nothing more than that, we get to the core problem with atheism – the dress code known as morality simply ceases to be important. That is, if an atheist believes X is wrong, they can easily ignore and dismiss it if it becomes inconvenient to refrain from doing X. We have already seen a concrete example of this. Richard Dawkins believes that eating meat is wrong. He even compares the eating of meat to owning a slave!

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