{"id":1072,"date":"2007-03-11T19:33:00","date_gmt":"2007-03-11T19:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/2007\/03\/11\/morality-and-authority\/"},"modified":"2007-03-11T19:33:00","modified_gmt":"2007-03-11T19:33:00","slug":"morality-and-authority","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/2007\/03\/11\/morality-and-authority\/","title":{"rendered":"morality and authority"},"content":{"rendered":"

Returning to an earlier theme, here’s something from my book The War For Children’s Minds<\/a> on whether it is a good idea to get children, or individuals more generally, to defer to some authority on moral and religious questions.<\/p>\n

Deferring to authority isn\u2019t always a bad idea. We do it all the time. No doubt you go to a doctor for a medical opinion, to a plumber for expertise on central heating, to a lawyer for legal advice, and so on. It\u2019s pretty reasonable to take the authority\u2019s word for it in these cases.<\/p>\n

In fact, modern life demands that we trust the expertise of others. The world is now so complex that any one of us can only properly understand how a tiny bit of it works. We can\u2019t all be experts on plumbing, science, the law, car mechanics, psychology, and so on. We have to seek out others upon whose expertise we inevitably have to rely.<\/p>\n

So what if you go to an authority on some matter, and they give you bad advice? Who\u2019s to blame, then, if things then go awry? Suppose, for example, that a student new to chemistry wants to know whether it\u2019s safe to dispose of a large lump of potassium by flushing it down the sink. They ask their chemistry professor, who tells them it will be perfectly safe. So the student drops the potassium in the sink. There\u2019s a huge explosion that kills another student. Is the student who was given the wrong advice to blame? Can she excuse herself by pointing out that her authority told her to do it?<\/p>\n

Yes she can. It was entirely reasonable for the student to trust the advice of their chemistry professor. She had every reason to accept the professor\u2019s advice. Generally speaking, if we go to the acknowledged experts for advice, and those experts assure us that something is a good idea when in fact it\u2019s a very bad idea, we\u2019re not morally culpable when things go wrong as a result.<\/p>\n

But if it\u2019s sensible to trust the word of medical, legal and plumbing experts \u2013 if we are justified in simply taking their word for it \u2013 then why not the word of moral experts?<\/p>\n

Suppose someone wants to know what sort of attitude she should have towards those who don\u2019t share the same religion as her. She goes to her community\u2019s religious and moral Authority for the answer, the Authority to which she has always deferred in the past. Suppose this Authority tells her that it is her moral duty to kill those who don\u2019t share the same religious beliefs as her. In fact, suppose this Authority tells her to go out, wire herself to some explosives, wander into a supermarket full of unbelievers, and blow herself up. She takes her moral Authority\u2019s word for it (as she always has) and goes out and kills several hundred people. Is this person also blameless?<\/p>\n

Intuitively not. Someone who goes out and kills on the instruction of a religious or some other moral Authority does not thereby avoid moral responsibility for what they have done. \u201cI was only following the instructions of my expert\u201d is not an excuse.
Of course, in the case of the suicide bomber, there may be mitigating factors. If we feel this individual did not really make a free decision \u2013 if she had been heavily psychologically manipulated, perhaps even brainwashed \u2013 then we might be slightly more forgiving. She might, for that reason, be less blameworthy. The point remains that she can\u2019t absolve herself from responsibility simply by saying, \u201cMy moral expert told me it was okay\u201d in the same way that the chemistry student can absolve herself of responsibility by saying \u201cMy chemistry expert told me it was okay\u201d.<\/p>\n

None of this is to say that we shouldn\u2019t seek moral advice, particularly when it comes to complex moral dilemmas. The advice we receive might be valuable. It might lead us to recognize that we were mistaken in holding a particular moral belief. No doubt some people really are better judges about what\u2019s right and what\u2019s wrong than are the rest of us. They\u2019re \u2018moral experts\u2019 in that sense. Arguably, these moral experts include some priests, imams and rabbis. If so, we might learn by listening to them. They may, in this sense, be \u201cauthoritative\u201d.<\/p>\n

However, to accept that some people may be \u201cauthorities\u201d in this sense is not to say that we should more-or-less uncritically defer to them on moral matters. It\u2019s not yet to say that anyone should be considered an Authority with a capital \u201cA\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Returning to an earlier theme, here’s something from my book The War For Children’s Minds on whether it is a good idea to get children, or individuals more generally, to defer to some authority on moral and religious questions. Deferring to authority isn\u2019t always a bad idea. We do it all the time. No doubt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith-schools","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}