(April 21, 2017 at 10:21 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:(April 20, 2017 at 2:34 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: I was intentionally vague since there are various types of authority - moral, expert, civil, etc. At the same time, there is a case to be made that expert and civil authority are in some sense derivative. When should someone defer to expert opinion? Why (or perhaps when) should people respect their civil authorities. As for following one's conscience, how does someone justify privileging his own conscience over the consciences of others? For example, we never say to another person, "You shouldn't do that because it violates my conscience." Instead, we tell others they are wrong by appealing to some shared higher authority - the law, reason, consensus opinion, holy writ, common decency, etc.
Is there such a thing as an expert opinion on moral facts - a respected thinker or group of people, like elders, on whom others should trust over their own personal feelings? And if there are, why should we trust them, if not because of our own judgement that they are reliable. A bit of a dilemma that one.
As an additional wrinkle, I would point out that there is a difference between knowing of a thing and knowing about it (in other words that something is versus what something is.) People can agree that there are moral facts without agreeing on how to determine what they are.
Any authority I decide to abide will only get my compliance so long as it doesn't violate my moral sensibilities. Once it does, it loses its authority.
Not sure it is wise to view it like that because 7 billion humans have different ideas of what "moral sensibilities" are and again, also why I don't think atheists should view that word as a form of morality.
Our species has always displayed acts of compassion and acts of cruelty and no label is a magic pill nor does label have the magic power of preventing the individual from doing bad.
I think the only pragmatic thing humans can do is strive to be diplomatic and avoid harming others physically. But our differences will always exist, even under the same umbrella labels we don't always agree.
My Australian friend Bob has a different spin on the so called "golden rule".
"Do on to others you'd have done to you".
He doesn't like that. He put it more like.....
"Don't do to others what you would not want done to you".
But even with that, we are still taking about 7 billion humans and while we seem to do better in the west valuing pluralism and human rights, we still don't live in a utopia where we can go with out ever being offended. The only thing we really have is the common law that you don't get to take the law into your own hands, you don't have the right to act out in violence when someone offends you, and you don't have the right to call for violence when you get offended.
Civility to me isn't about never offending or never getting offended, but how one reacts in the face of those situations.
