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RE: Principles and Predictions
It's a delusion to think I'll stun anyone, but I'll give it a shot. Imagine a free society where person A wants to do something but fears it might hurt person B. Is it moral for him to do it without consulting B?
Extrapolating on that, the exchange of information between individuals allow them to take actions that would be immoral to individuals alone, either because they are unsure of the outcomes or not completely confident on the principles behind the action.
Not a bad shot, but I'll explain how you miss the mark...
We can concretize your scenario fairly easily: let's say person A is hungry and person B has an apple. Person A would like to eat the apple. If person A simply eats the apple, then it is an act of theft and is immoral. But if A asks B if he can eat the apple, and B consents, then it is no longer theft.
The difference between whether the act is moral or immoral is consent. (You could substitute lots of stuff in the scenario, by the way, including sex and even death.) So the exchange of information is required not to make an immoral act a moral one, but to determine whether the act itself is moral or immoral.
If B says "no, that's my apple and I want to eat it myself", then for A to eat it would be immoral. A cannot delegate to person C the right to take the apple without B's consent, because A didn't have the moral right to do that in the first place.
The question itself doesn't pertain to a right like self-defense. It pertains primarily to taxes and regulations. Since you have no right to steal, you can't delegate to someone the right to steal on your behalf.
But your response does a great job of honing in on the difference between moral and immoral acts: consent. The exchange of information is necessary to establish consent and therefore the morality of given actions.
And in case anyone wants to walk down the road of ethics in emergencies, there are scenarios where consent can be obtained after the fact. Like pushing someone out of the way of a speeding bus -- an act which is rescue with consent, but assault without it.
You're a wordsmith -followed
Thanks for a great answer! But I'll try a second punch, if you don't mind.
Somewhere on this forum I argued that maybe we make judgment calls based on both principles (deontological ethics) and consequences (consequentialism). I know the author is concerned with principles alone, but our brain probably weighs the two, in ways I don't claim to know, to get to an answer of right or wrong.
That said, I throw in the towel on deontological grounds. There is no way to delegate a moral right that you don't have. (Well, unless it was thought in advance that the collective had the moral right to act, but that is another discussion.)
But in terms of consequentialism, things change. It might not be moral for one person to act because he feels he cannot adequately predict the consequences. But if enough people join in, their prediction might be good enough for them to act.
I'll illustrate. Imagine your neighbor's wacky religion makes him treat his kid in a way you disapprove. Questions about his freedom of religion against his kid's rights will pop up on your head and you might find the problem too tough. You might then default to not intervene. (After all, maybe the kid can survive without a blood transfusion.)
A solution to this problem lies in asking for help from the community, so the issue is assessed by more people and more solutions arise. This is not exactly delegating a moral right you don't have - it's more like consolidating a moral imperative - but its end result is the same: the collective may morally act when the individual can't.
I'd just point out the the same principle acts in reverse, in what's called diffusion of responsability. In this phenomenon, people don't act because they believe it is society's responsibility to act. The existence of such a phenomenon is a hint that sometimes it might be moral for the collective to act, even if no individual could.