- 24 Jan 2023 02:07
#15262954
Whose authority do you submit to or respect?
What undermines authority? What strengthens it?
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/enlightenment.htm
https://archive.org/details/4.Macintyre/mode/1up
[url] https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunde ... review.htm
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What undermines authority? What strengthens it?
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/enlightenment.htm
Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another. This minority is self-incurred when its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! [dare to be wise] Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment.
It is because of laziness and cowardice that so great a part of humankind, after nature has long since emancipated them from other people’s direction (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless gladly remains minors for life, and that it becomes so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor! If I have a book that understands for me, a spiritual advisor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides upon a regimen for me, and so forth, I need not trouble myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay; others will readily undertake the irksome business for me.
https://archive.org/details/4.Macintyre/mode/1up
To answer this question consider what kind of authority any principle has which it is open to us to choose to regard as authoritative or not. I may choose for example to observe a regime of asceticism and fasting and I may do this for reasons of health, let us say, or religion. What authority such principles possess derives from the reasons for my choice. Insofar as they are good reasons, the principles have corresponding authority; insofar as they are not, the principles are to that same extent deprived of authority. It would follow that a principle for the choice of which no reasons could be given would be a principle devoid of authority. I might indeed adopt such a principle from whim or caprice or from some arbitrary purpose-I just happen to like acting in that way-but if I then chose to abandon the principle whenever it suited me, I would be entirely free to do so. Such a principle-and it may even be stretching language to call it a principlewould seem clearly to belong to Kierkegaard's aesthetic realm.
But now the doctrine of Enten-Eller is plainly to the effect that the principles which depict the ethical way of life are to be adopted for no reason, but for a choice that lies beyond reasons, just because it is the choice of what is to count for us as a reason. Yet the ethical is to have authority over us. But how can that which we adopt for one reason have any authority over us? The contradiction in Kierkegaard's doctrine is plain. To this someone might reply that we characteristically appeal to authority when we have no reasons; we may appeal to the authority of the custodians of the Christian revelation, for example, at the very point where reason breaks down. So that the notion of authority and the notion of reason are not, as my argument suggests, intimately connected, but are in fact mutually exclusive. Yet this concept of authority as excluding reason is, as I have already noticed, itself a peculiarly, even if not exclusively, modem concept, fashioned in a culture to which the notion of authority is alien and repugnant, so that appeals to authority appear irrational. But the traditional authority of the ethical, in the culture which Kierkegaard inherited, was not of this arbitrary kind. And it is this traditional concept of authority which must be embodied in the ethical if it is to be as Kierkegaard describes it. (It is not surprising that just as it was Kierkegaard who first discovered the concept of radical choice, so it is in Kierkegaard's writings that the links between reason and authority are broken too.)
[url] https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunde ... review.htm
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It seems to me that the counterfactual element of everyone’s word having equal sway and the force of argument only carrying weight needs to be given some consideration. In real life, the word of people who have greater experience or a proven record in some domain counts for more. Is this inherently elitist? I don’t think so. For example, I have a right to make claims about activities with which I am intimately concerned over the word of others who have no such involvement.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
-For Ethical Politics