 Bertrand Russell Quotes 366 |
The second argument is that, if moral education has been confined to the inculcation of tabus, the man who throws over one tabu is likely to throw over all the rest. If you have been taught that all the Ten Commandments are equally binding, and you then come to the conclusion that work on the sabhath is not wicked, you may decide that murder also is permissible, and that there is no reason why any one act should be thought worse than any other. The general moral collapse which often follows a sudden irruption of free thought is attributable to the absence of a rational basis for the traditional ethical code.
Source: Bertrand Russell: Human Society in Ethics and Politics, (1954), chapter 1
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