The authority of moral rules

✍ Scribed by J. Moreh

• Publisher: Springer US
• Year: 1989
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 852 KB
• Volume: 27
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0040-5833
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00135099

✦ Synopsis

The wide gap between the prescriptions of moral rules and actual human behaviour is attributed to two factors which undermine the authority of moral rules, the one mainly affecting people's behaviour as individuals, and the other their behaviour as members of collectives. (a) Morality suffers from an inner tension: if it allows exemptions, e.g. that lying may be used as a retaliatory or protective measure, then its domain is eroded; if it allows no exceptions, it is too stringent and it is flouted. Hence the moral agent who is the upholder of morality is also the transgressor of its rules. (b) Groups have evolved hostile and oppressive institutions for dealing with each other. In the setting up of these institutions and in the practising of them, individual moral responsibility is attenuated to vanishing point, so that moral rules are ineffectual in a large area of human interaction.