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The Difference Is, We're Right, Take 492

authority, decision making, legitimacy, morality, truth —

27 Aug 2009

Morality not absolute in sense that to kill is always wrong, rather, morality involves submitting to legitimate authority. Should authority be legitimate, its demands are by definition legitimate and to be moral is to follow them (it just occurred to me when writing this that "morality," generally and in all cases, might be best defined as that which allows us to interact most cooperatively within society or groups). This would seem to be the thought process happening behind the phrase "the difference is, we're right." Morality is not subjective per se, in that this one rule is absolute to all peoples, but it is subjective in the sense that each believes their own authority to be legitimate and others to be illegitimate.

Those on the other side might ask whether a legitimate authority would ever make the request to kill other people because they see not killing as a higher level moral imperative than submission, and those in the middle would ask whether a strict set of guidelines might not be laid out defining when killing could be considered just and unjust (ie - just war theory).

I'm currently leaning towards the last idea myself. Possibly even the second. I still cannot wrap my head around the idea that the first makes any sense at all. Of course, the authorities that I tend to align myself with most are that of humanity first and the law second. Aligning oneself with a smaller subset of people inevitably leads to conflict with other groups that would make the first proposition (killing to protect the authority system) logical in certain instances. Of course, logical decisions do not always turn out to be correct decisions, given that the foundations of any decision are inevitably based on an incomplete set of information.

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