Who's To Say?

Michael-John Turp asks if anyone has the authority to establish moral truth.

- Michael-John Turp

Socrates famously got himself into trouble by persistently questioning authority. He irritated his fellow citizens so much that he ended up on trial. Eventually he accepted his sentence of execution by drinking hem lock rather than evading the law by fleeing to an easy exile.

While few philosophers are as courageous (or as rash?) as Socrates, we generally remain similarly suspicious of appeals to authority. We worry that too many self-proclaimed authorities are purveyors of self-serving puffery and nonsense. We like to prod, probe and question received wisdom. We ask for reasons, evidence, and argument. Arguments should be weighed on their merits not their origins. Bad people can have good ideas, and good people can have bad ideas. In my experience, the authority-doubting question ‘Who’s to say?’ is especially popular among moral relativists.

In some contexts, it makes sense to answer this question positively and suppose that there is someone with the authority to ‘say’, that is, to dictate the truth. For example, a Supreme Court might have the authority to say whether some law is constitutional. More prosaically, parents get to say that bedtime is at 8 o’clock. In these cases, a decision is made by an appropriate authority. But philosophical questions are unlike this. We do not get to decide, for example, whether we have free will or whether God exists. In any case, there are no relevant authorities to whom we could delegate such decisions. I have wonderful philosophical colleagues, many of whom I suspect to be better-informed, smarter, and more virtuous than me. Sadly, I have no colleagues with the authority to decide whether for example the mind is identical to the brain.