and who woke on the wrong side of the bed this morning?? (the wrong side of the bed is, of course, not the left side)
Quote:The question that springs from it is "Does society have the authority to force that moral duty on someone?" (How many times have we all heard "You can't legislate morality!"?)
Is a "moral society" a collection of people with similar morals or a collection of people forced to accept a given morality?
"You can't legislate morality" really speaks to a different problem...laws not making people gooder of heart. Or, it is sometimes used in the context of legislating private matters, eg bedroom, in line with some particular 'moral' view.
It's not an easy set of questions you ask. From where or from what does any 'moral truth' derive. How do we recognize one when we see one?
We can accept authority on the matter (church), but that's a bit of a problem in that religion A and religion B speak differently. We can give up the task, it being perceived as impossibly difficult, and fall back to something quite Hobbesian. Or we can go Millian-style, concluding the best we can hope for is a pragmatic 'get out of the way' set of policies. Or we can try to think about it further than that, and like Rawls or others, work out some systems and agreements to which all, or most of us, can reasonably agree.
One way to think of the problem is to consider what sort of community we wish to live in. For example, I support universal education not because it provides fodder for commerce, but because I'd much rather have educated and reasoning neighbors. In terms of taxation/sharing etc, I'd far rather live in a community where my neighbors are rather more like the priest from Les Miserable than like Gordon Gekko.
I'm sure we'd both agree that the aim is to find some system whereby the greater number of people are facilitated towards personal happiness. Not only does this seem prudent (they aren't likely to rip the community apart) and it addresses the moral component as well (which I know you are not deaf to).
I think that sense of moral duty is inherent in us, as biological creatures. And I think it can be encouraged or it can be denigrated. Gekko would denigrate it, but the priest would encourage it. Those are two extremes, of course, and my argument is weak because of that, but that's not to say the point is without any merit.
As I'm sure I mentioned another time, an essay Rawls wrote not long before he died, contained his admission that his 'Theory of Justice' has been written to attempt a bridge across the traditional divide between left/right as to this matter we are addressing. I think he did it. Unfortunately, rather more Europeans share my view than do Americans.
