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The Reith Lectures

Significant international thinkers deliver the BBC's flagship annual lecture series.

The Reith Lectures: Bertrand Russell - Authority and the Individual: Individual and Social Ethics

30/01/1949

Individual and Social Ethics

Bertrand Russell - Authority and the Individual

BBC Radio 4 - The Reith Lectures, Bertrand Russell - Authority and the Individual, Individual and Social Ethics

Bertrand Russell argues for personal morality over tribal customs to guide conduct. 

Bertrand Russell argues that man needs personal morality to guide his conduct and must learn to be critical of tribal customs and beliefs that may be generally accepted.

The inaugural Reith Lecturer is the philosopher, mathematician, and social reformer Bertrand Russell. One of the founders of analytic philosophy and a Nobel Laureate, he is the author of Principia Mathematica, and the bestselling History of Western Philosophy, written in 1946. His Reith lecture series is entitled 'Authority and the Individual'. 

In his final lecture, entitled 'Individual and Social Ethics', he relates social and political doctrines to the individual ethics by which people guide their personal lives. He argues that Man needs a sense of personal morality to guide his conduct, and must learn to be critical of tribal customs and beliefs that may be generally accepted amongst his neighbours. Primitive impulses, he says, can find harmless outlets in adventure and creation. He suggests that Man has always been subject to two miseries: firstly, those imposed by external nature which are now largely diminished by science; and secondly, those that men inflict on each other, such as through war. Russell rejects the argument that human nature demands war, believing instead that the greed for possession will lessen as the fear of destitution is removed from society.

The Reith Lectures: Bertrand Russell - Authority and the Individual

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Philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell gives the inaugural Reith lecture series.

The philosopher, mathematician and social reformer Bertrand Russell gives the inaugural Reith lecture series on the subject of Authority and the Individual.

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