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3 comments
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TheMastaDebata5y ago
ACAB also authority is corrupted easily as a rule, not as as an exception
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Mixed
eleanorburleigh4y ago
In the 1970s, Stephen Darwell theorised about [two different kinds of respect] (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2379993):
**Recognition respect** = respect for an object as an authority, giving appropriate weight to some element of an object/institution/person. You might have 'recognition respect' of the law, someone's feelings, social bodies.
**Appraisal respect** = respect for a person based on their merits or the role they occupy. You might have 'appraisal respect' for a good teacher or a person you really admire.
When we think about 'respecting authority', this probably relates to recognition respect or to some intersection of the two. Does this make it an important criteria for judging right and wrong?
- If we take the recognition respect angle, I think it does provide relevant criteria for judging right and wrong - if not the ideal criteria, then the one that is most commonly used.
- Right and wrong are [social concepts] (https://medium.com/@shawn.cook/beyond-good-and-evil-a-moral-fiction-in-meta-physics-1cd3c0e06cf3) in that they don't exist outside of our human understanding of them. And when we exercise 'recognition respect' towards things like social institutions and the law, a basic moral framework for right and wrong emerges.
I think it's a complicated issue - because you can get into the nitty grittiness of it by looking at cases like Nazi Germany, where respect for authority [created a sense of right & wrong] (https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/how-did-hitler-happen) that we wholeheartedly condemn now.
But I think in human history, generally, the senses we have and have had of what is right and wrong have been formed against a framework of respect for authority. This can easily lead onto or intersect with arguments about whether there can be any objective judgements about what's right and what's wrong.
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Turi4y ago
This is so helpful as a framer... Thank you 🙏
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