Surely just about everybody has faced a moral dilemma and secretly wished, "If only somebody ? somebody I trusted ? could tell me what to do!"
Wouldn't that be morally inauthentic? Aren't we responsible for making our own moral decisions? Yes, but the virtues of "do it yourself" moral
reasoning have their limits, and if you decide, after conscientious consideration, that your moral decision is to delegate further moral decisions in
your life to a trusted expert, then you have made your own moral decision. You have decided to take advantage of the division of labor that
civilization makes possible and get the help of expert specialists.
We applaud the wisdom of that course in all other important areas of decision making (don't try to be your own doctor, the lawyer who represents
himself has a fool for a client, and so forth). Even in the case of political decisions, like which way to vote, the policy of delegation can be
defended. When my wife and I go to a town meeting, I know that she has studied the issues so much more assiduously than I that I routinely follow her
lead, voting the way she tells me. Even if I'm not sure why, I have plenty of evidence for my conviction that, if we did take the time and energy to
thrash it all out, she'd persuade me that, all things considered, her opinion was correct. Is that a dereliction of my duties as a citizen? I don't
think so, but it does depend on my having good grounds for trusting her judgment. Love is not enough.
That's why those who have an unquestioning faith in the correctness of the moral teachings of their religion are a problem: If they haven't
conscientiously considered, on their own, whether their pastors or priests or rabbis or imams are worthy of such delegated authority over their lives,
then they are taking a personally immoral stand. |
