As far as nature red in tooth and claw goes… well yes, but it’s clearly a bit more than that too

Sure, there are natural instincts for empathy and cooperation &c. It’s just that they are only natural and Nature is descriptive, not prescriptive. If the ‘is’ is all there is, there is no transcendent imperative to foster those instincts rather than other, less humane ones.

otherwise the killer apes would have donked us on the heads long ago…

Haven’t there been significant times and places when donking was the norm? (“At the bottom of the stairs: anarchy, hell, Haiti, Mogadishu, Lagos. For you they are waiting! For you, for you, for you, these hells! For you! Stop on the stairs; listen quietly; hear Mogadishu, in the blackness below, reeking of piss, waiting for you; purring; licking her chops. She wants you. You! And your family! Anarchy is hungry, hungry, always hungry. Insatiable. Yet patient.”)

laofmoonster:

a moral system that does not take the self-preservation of moral agents into consideration becomes moot

Debatable. “For whosoever will save his life …”

In any case, one might feel self-preservation of the moral agent properly entails the ruthless subordination of other moral agents. (“No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”)

There are serious inconsistencies with Dawkins position. It’s also questionable if he furthers his position in any successful way… for a scientist he seems to have responded towards his (legitimate) fear of organised religion… irrationally.

As far as nature red in tooth and claw goes… well yes, but it’s clearly a bit more than that too, otherwise the killer apes would have donked us on the heads long ago…

But still, for someone that admits he believes in moral relativism and that his morality is at root just a lot of subjective preferences originating in biological and cultural inheritances and not derivable from any universal natural principle, he’s awfully selective about who he likes to criticize. (And he’s learned the hard way that Islam’s off limits too).

But if a devout Catholic is asked about abortion and says ‘it’s just wrong’, Dawkins is there to criticize, “Any Fetus Is Less Human Than an Adult Pig.”

But when Barry Eich gets fired because the hashtag activists think his support for traditional marriage ‘is just wrong’, or when Andrew Sullivan talks about enhanced interrogation with the fully-reasoned argument ‘it’s just wrong!’ – Dawkins does not correct them and say, “No chaps, I’m sorry. I may share your sentiments, but let us be intellectually correct and recognize that these transcendental, universalist moral claims are completely invalid. It is nonsensical to say ‘it is wrong’, and instead you can only say ‘I don’t like it’. I know, I know, it has much less rhetorical heft, well, I’m sorry, that’s how it goes.”

(Insofar as Dawkins and Rorty are wrong, it’s because of selection processes / some civilization-scale analogue of game theory. Certain strategies reliably outcompete others. I don’t think that point has been widely grasped yet even within the academy; they’re slow, and now we’re ahead of them.)

But in the next breath Dawkins admitted he couldn’t actually put forward an intellectual argument against Ragnar Redbeard because he can’t derive an ‘ought’ from ‘is’ any more than Ragnar can — he can’t say the strong “ought” to protect the weak, that feelings of outraged empathy imply there is a moral imperative to strive to overcome our selfish instincts: If somebody used my views to justify a completely self-centred lifestyle, which involved trampling all over other people in any way they chose, roughly what, I suppose, at a sociological level social Darwinists did — I think I would be fairly hard put to it to argue on purely intellectual grounds. … I couldn’t, ultimately, argue intellectually against somebody who did something I found obnoxious. … I don’t feel equipped to produce moral arguments in the way I feel equipped to produce arguments of a cosmological and biological kind.”

So he lamely concludes: “I think it would be more: ‘This is not a society in which I wish to live. Without having a rational reason for it necessarily, I’m going to do whatever I can to stop you doing this.’ … I think I could finally only say, ‘Well, in this society you can’t get away with it’ and call the police.”

And in that moment he has conceded the basic Redbeardian premise — it all boils down to competing wills striving for supremacy. Dawkins just happens to be lucky that his vision of right currently has a monopoly of might, that he can call the police …

What we have is more a situation where no one can agree who really is whose enemy nor what methods of pacification really ‘work’ anymore.