A just thinker will allow full swing to his skepticism.
Today I learned about a university professor who argued that Thomas Jefferson's slaves were responsible for their own enslavement. I am skeptical that this professor had any good intentions.
But the official man can no wise help you in any question of to-day, they deriving entirely from the old dead things. Only those can help in counsel or conduct who did not make a party pledge to defend this or that, but who were appointed by God Almighty, before they came in the world, to stand for this which they uphold.
As I thought about how some fundamental societal changes could be made, including how to ensure financial security, how could these changes be made without legal changes? And which judge, lawyer, legislator, etc. would offer to dramatically change the laws upon which their careers are made? Not likely to happen, unless the alleged law is unsupportable - where the governed can no longer be asked to adhere to an unjust law. A few centuries had to pass before dramatic changes were made in this country to abolish slavery.
Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he do not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun. What a day dawns when we have taken to heart the doctrine of faith! to prefer, as a better investment, being to doing; being to seeming; logic to rhythm and to display; the year to the day, the life to the year; character to performance; - and have come to know that justice will be done us; and if our genius is slow, the term will be long.
As slaveholders sought the assistance of the entire nation to support their alleged proprietary interest in slaves, it also had to find a basis for denying justice. Somehow, they were being cheated. In Washington, DC slaveholders were given $300 per slave as a result of President Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves in DC, recently commemorated on April 16.
I have little doubt that the perceptual equation of morals with religion has caused vast populations to think that morals or ethics have no place in contemporary society - that we should do away with those considerations since it appears that someone else's morals or ethics are being imposed upon us.
Now, more than every, in my view, some moral or ethical dimension must come into our lives. We are confronted with blast after blast of technological indifference to humanity.
Recently, social media enterprises are trying to code ethics into algorithms. How exactly is that to be done? The only morals and ethics that will be part of an algorithm will be those of the coders - so whatever moral underpinnings she or he has will necessarily exist or not in its functioning. But this is one of many last footholds or truly "human" measurement or understanding.
Why do we continue to be so quick to shrug off responsibility for our own welfare?
That we get beyond worrying about our neighbors cheating us to a point where we will start concerning ourselves about whether we are cheating our neighbor. Which leads me to wonder whether, social media-related technology will ever improve human relationships or just cause increasing moral delegation to amoral calculators.
There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals.
Maybe we are coming to a tipping point - that in order to be a thinking person you must also be (or at least try to be!) a moral person - one cannot exist without the other.
Quotes are from Worship an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson.