I agree. But life is complex enough to simply adhere, obey, without convening one's personal legislature or supreme court. The speed limit really is not a direct personal challenge. One trusts, in other words. And remembers Socrates: if not to agree with him entirely, then to be mindful of the idea that obedience to law is more than just doing what it says - but that was his personal self-legislation.

Kant of course would have argued that obedience to the law as duty, if the law can stand as duty, is the only choice a free man really has - to do his duty.

Obedience to, say, ice cream, is indulgence, license, but by the more austere measure of freedom is just no freedom at all, but the illusion of it, even as you decide between chocolate and vanilla - because ice cream is a matter of desire, and governance by desire is not freedom.

The path to freedom, imo, is to apply the lessons of the Nuremberg trials, themselves the expression of ages of wisdom. No man can escape responsibility for his actions because his actions were ordered. This partakes of, though is not in itself, Sartre's "we are condemned to be free." The right approach is to own the order and legislate it for oneself, if possible. If not possible, then a crisis. But the price of freedom is crises. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry tried to refresh the failing courage of a French fellow-pilot c. 1942 when French fortunes of war were at a nadir and battles raging by saying to him rhetorically, "You really are not expecting to survive this, are you?!" And I think this is right. Sometimes survival is not the issue but that freedom is, and freedom, being essentially a capacity for discernment and then an ability to act according to the right, is not always compatible with mere survival. -Although one can be mindful of living to fight another day.

An interesting point. But it seems to me that there are areas where reason does require obedience. It can be reasonable to set up an authority. It can further be reasonable to invest this authority with force that is not subject to immediate questioning. Disobeying an unreasonable command can still have negative effects if the disobedience impedes the function of the authority in general.

Law enforcement, for example, would be significantly hampered if any decision was subject to immediate appeal and had to be legislated until it is established that it is resonable. Authority is necessary both for law enfordement to function and in order to protect those employed to enforce it.

It seems to me that rational or justified action involves acting on reason. But obedience requires acting based on authority or submission.

If someone makes a reasonable command you can judge it to be reasonable and then obey. But obedience usually requires suppressing ones own ideas and does not imply recourse to reason. — Andrew4Handel

In some occasions obedience is quite logical, even if you don't think the command is the most optimal.

For instance, a symphony orchestra follows the conductor. The conductor decides on the tempo, not the individual musicians. Now the musicians in the orchestra could have ideas how the musical piece ought to be played, but they understand that they simply cannot decide this on their own as the end result would be a terrible cacophony. The similar thing happens when you have to organize hundreds or thousands of people to coordinate their actions in order to do something. You simply cannot assume to make every decision by consensus in these situations.

Far too easily people look at obedience as some kind of social power issue and not a result of simple necessity.

Rationality is a kind of obedience also. Scientific rationality has more in common than one might think to obedience to religious authority. To be rational is to be in conformity with a grounding principle of rationality. This ground itself is generally not questioned by those who see truth in terms of rationality. Thus they don't recognize their obedience to this ground. In the age of Reason,the authority of religious faith was replaced by the authority of scientific rationality, via truth as correspondence. But obedience to the rational has come under question in philosophy in the past 100 years(Dewey, James, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Deleuze, etc)..

To be rational is to be in conformity with a grounding principle of rationality — Joshs

I think that rationality leads to an is but not to an ought. Obedience is an ought.

Rationality may be very persuasive about a course of action but I don't think it has the compulsion of obedience.

What if the legislating authority and the obeying subject are the same? It would appear that obedience in such case could hardly be irrational.

It can further be reasonable to invest this authority with force that is not subject to immediate questioning. — Echarmion

Before you set up an authority you need to know if it is justified.

The Police is a controversial area but I think The Fire service is more straightforward. A command by the fire service is assumed to be reasonable because there goal is to prevent fire or help you escape from fire.

In this case obedience to a command is based on an assumption of rational governance. But that appears to be a minority case. And nevertheless one could still disobey the fire service. It is the cases were the most authority is that require scrutiny.

What if the legislating authority and the obeying subject are the same? It would appear that obedience in such case could hardly be irrational. — Mww

What do you mean by the legislating authority? I don't think legislation is irrational but I think you should only adhere to it based on rationality.

The problem arises is when you have a legitimate and logical objection to authority and norms and then face an arduous struggle or sense of oppression in trying to fight your case.

I think most people can just obey authority unquestioningly until it infringes on a value or intuition they have. But even if society seems progressive and reasonable is not a justification to become complacent or apathetic.

I don't think rationality and obedience are always separate. Obedience can be rational/logical and I actually think there are more examples where it'd be better to just follow orders/rules than try to think for yourself.

1. Money Management
2. Weight-loss/Muscle building/Nutrition
3. How to succeed in your career
4. Learning to become good at a game/sport or learning a skill
5. Treatment of illnesses both physical and mental, injuries, rashes and so on
6. Operating machinery/equipment

So many things really where it would be much better to seek out someone who actually knows what they're talking about and follow what they say word for word. Many people try to work through things rationally and fail because they have no idea what they're talking about. No experience, no knowledge, no understanding.

Once you've achieved competence then you can start to think for yourself but until then just follow like a mindless sheep. I suppose the aforementioned stance is an attempt to be rational about it, so if you said rationality and obedience aren't separate in this instance then I wouldn't try to argue against that.

So that doesn't mean you should obey people who don't have your best interests at heart or haven't demonstrated the level of competence necessary for them to be teaching you anything.

Far too easily people look at obedience as some kind of social power issue and not a result of simple necessity. — ssu

I think an orchestra is based on an agreement. You can leave the orchestra if repeatedly frustrated by the conductor.

I think the necessity of obedience is only partially true. Such as in the orchestra example. It is pragmatic to cooperate with an authority to maximize a desire.

But I do not think it is a perpetual justifiable excuse. For example if you are starving you may do all manner of things including prostitution to earn money to buy food. But not every case of acting is based on immediate survival. Creating a necessity can lead to a tyranny. Someone can just withdraw resources from you to make you compliant.

So many things really where it would be much better to seek out someone who actually knows what they're talking about and follow what they say word for word. — Judaka

But I think this a case of taking advice. I agree that there are authorities if you need to achieve a certain goal. But I don't see that they should be given a dictatorial status.

A problem is that not all areas of life have experts. There may be a computing expert but is there an equal parenting expert or life coach? It would actually be great if someone could solve a personal or psychological problem in the manner that a computer expert can solve a computing problem.

Nevertheless I still process advice through reason and do not just obey instructions unthinkingly.

Nevertheless I still process advice through reason and do not just obey instructions unthinkingly. — Andrew4Handel

A great example for me of why this isn't as good as it seems would be this exercise program that I follow stronglifts 5x5. The guy who runs it, Medhi, used to answer questions asked to him and send the answers to his subscribers. The majority of questions were people who thought they knew better than him about what they could be doing, should be doing and what made sense to them.

Stronglfits 5x5 has worked for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people if not millions, the app has a 5-star rating and Medhi has poured a lot of effort into creating the program. He made countless mistakes and learned from them over 15 years of lifting.

Whether it makes "sense" to you is based on what exactly? These people have barely any experience lifting, they don't understand the physiology of the human body and they haven't done sufficient research on the subject. It's easy to see by their questions.

They give their theories, their reasoning and I'm sure to them what they're saying makes perfect sense. So they change their programs based on that and don't end up getting any results because they messed up the program. Go figure.

It's the same on philosophy forums, people try to answer scientific questions with their theories and logic. Is that really a sensible way to be approaching objective truth? When you don't know anything?

I don't know what problem you think that an inexperienced, uneducated person couldn't solve more easily by listening to someone else who isn't those things but even if they exist, the majority of the time it's not like that.

There is let's say a "competence cap" where from thereon, you are the educated one with expertise and you can make your own decisions based on the unique circumstances. It's more like Usefulness of rationality = rationality x knowledge x experience. If knowledge and experience are low then rationality just loses to obedience to competent people every single time.

Rationality means nothing outside of a system of valuation. So 'ought' orients and organizes the meaning of any system of facts by requiring facts to be interpreted according to a scheme or paradigm.. 'Obedience to' a condition of possiblity is the way that things make sense according to a framework. Changing frameworks amounts to obeying a new master.

It depends upon the context. Blind obedience is the kind of logical fallacy that you are talking about where someone assumes something based solely on it's source of authority. Avoiding this fallacy is essentially exhibiting your freedom to question the status quo.

On the other hand, a hierarchy of positions of authority can lead to more efficient workforce, or military force.

Obedience, without any qualification, is bad because in this case we've surrendered rationality to an authority. Nevertheless there are people/circumstances who/where obedience plays an important role. Children of learning can/do safely take the words of their parents and teachers as the truth.

The logical form of obedience is when we've established the credibility/expertise of an authority.

Rationality means nothing outside of a system of valuation. So 'ought' orients and organizes the meaning of any system of facts by requiring facts to be interpreted according to a scheme or paradigm — Joshs

I think reason and rationality are only values if you tell other people that they ought to be reasonable or rational.

Facts, logic, reason and rationality have proved themselves as methods to find out facts, negotiate reality and do science et al.

There is a difference between someone being an authority on a subject and having authority. Anyone can be given authority with no expertise and I think people are conflating the two here.

Obedience does not imply someone has authoritative knowledge it just implies they have power.

Even if you are not an expert on a subject you can still reason about it to some extent if a demand is being made on you. The alternative is an authoritarian regime that does not allow people to assume they have adequate reasoning power.

On the other hand, a hierarchy of positions of authority can lead to more efficient workforce, or military force. — Harry Hindu

I think before you create a sophisticated society like this a lot of justification is needed. Otherwise you have what is like a headless bureaucracy disempowering the individual.

Some people might support a monarchy with an arbitrary head of state so that no group or structure can dominate power. Just because it is more straightforward and something you can latch on to and religion might have the same role.

I think it is best to teach critical thinking and limit any organisations power to empower the individual. It is a difficult balance. But nevertheless overall I think obedience has been terrible for humanity.

No man can escape responsibility for his actions because his actions were ordered. — tim wood

Do you mean responsibility in this life or the next?

I think people do use obedience to negate personal responsibility.

Yes, indeed, but have you heard of the interpretration of fact and value? Goes something like this:

"To be objective, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be
designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects? Let us look at an extended example from the philosopher Nelson Goodman.

A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length: If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or
a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is.
And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core."

I view rationality as a process not a set of axioms or beliefs. I don't think rationality leads to certainty.

If you didn't want to discuss obedience in all of its forms then you should have thus stipulated. I am not conflating all the contexts for obedience, I am doing the opposite actually.

What you're talking about has nothing to do with my point at all, to say I am conflating things is absurd. I was not even discussing people making "demands of you". I was talking about people willingly acting in compliance with a competent individual's recommendations unquestioningly.

Obedience in so far as it is that you obey out of fear or self-preservation, it's fairly obvious that unless you can find a way around that, if your fear is rational then acting to keep what you fear to happen from happening is rational.

To me the culture of obedience is anathema to rationality. But as Erich Fromm argues people fear freedom and therefore obedience allows people to rely on something else that they (falsely) believe is an authority. — Andrew4Handel

What context did you have in mind? Rather than forcing me to go around guessing until we're discussing the same thing.

I was talking about people willingly acting in compliance with a competent individual's recommendations unquestioningly. — Judaka

I am referring to obedience as submission. I think obedience entails submission.

I believe what you are talking about is choosing to accept someones recommendations that choice is made based on the belief that they are an expert and that belief is based on something else such as the persons success in the field they claim to be an authority in.

And you yourself have used the word "recommendation" not command.

I am personally talking about the phenomena of obedience as an attitude and something that is seen as morally praiseworthy. I think asking questions and not immediately submitting is almost always the preferable thing.

I am thinking of large scale events such as the wars that humans have been involved in and unjust political structures that oppress large sections of a population. Political apathy and so on. Children obeying parents when the parents have not justified their authority. Forms of authority not earned by reason.

I don't think anyone can justify submitting to politics or society. Because I do not think they have a valid authority to control a person. In comparison people are allowed to refuse medical treatment even if the person offering it was someone who had never lost a patient and was a world renowned expert.

I still don't know what you're talking about, what examples can you give where obedience is treated as morally praiseworthy?

I definitely don't think obedience entails submission at all so perhaps that means we won't agree on whether obedience can be rational or not.

Submission to some extent literally means to throw away your own will. I can't think of any examples in Western society where submission is thought of as being a good thing except perhaps the idea of submission to God. In other cultures, submission can be thought of as a good thing but it's clearly based on power and obligation and restricts self-interest and rational thought.

When you say "obey" and "obedience" are you referencing the kind of obedience that a dog exhibits when it is commanded to sit, stay, heel, etc. or the kind of obedience that (99.9% of) Americans exhibit when a Highway Patrol orders them to pull over. These obedience behaviors are practically like reflexes. Lights and siren, one pulls over. One wouldn't think of doing anything else.

On the other hand, there is obedience to laws, warnings, and the like. Obedience and non-compliance is too complicated to be rote. Complying with IRS rules requires interpretation. A warning about how to mix, and how not to mix, chemical x and y together may take up several pages of discussion. Obedience will be a very careful, rational response.

It seems like many powerful authorities would like to receive rote obedience. "Jump!" when I say "jump." Quick and (largely automatic) obedience requires training -- whether of a dog or of a soldier or a child. Dogs and people are not naturally inclined to do what they are told. Obedience training has to get over the "Why should I?" response. "What's in it for me?" (Self-interest doesn't have to be a consciously worked-out position.)

People can make a rational decision to undergo obedience training -- they sign up for military service.

What examples can you give where obedience is treated as morally praiseworthy? — Judaka

Obedience to parents. Obedience to School teachers. Obedience to the Police. Obedience to legislation. In any dictatorship or theocracy obedience is seen as praiseworthy.

If I obey the traffic lights on a road then I am submitting. If ignore a red light and cross when I feel like it I am not submitting. Unless they are trained by humans, pets will do what they feel like. Humans are unique for the vast array of rules they submit to.

If you want to object to a rule you probably have to go to court and have a long court case to try and get a rule change. Life involves a lot of submitting and compliance without people even considering it.

The etymology of obedience is "submission to a higher power or authority," from Old French obedience "obedience, submission"

https://www.etymonline.com/word/obedience

Scientific rationality has more in common than one might think to obedience to religious authority. To be rational is to be in conformity with a grounding principle of rationality. This ground itself is generally not questioned by those who see truth in terms of rationality. Thus they don't recognize their obedience to this ground. In the age of Reason,the authority of religious faith was replaced by the authority of scientific rationality, via truth as correspondence. — Joshs

Bingo! Thanks for getting it and expressing it so concisely.

Obedience will be a very careful, rational response. — Bitter Crank

I don't know if following governmental rules is obedience. It could be resignation. I think complying with regulations can be rational, pragmatic and self interested. I think if one follows a rule because it is in ones own interest that is not quite obedience.

Think following rules is to some extent inevitable for survival but it is forced on us. But to some extent there is a democratic agreement here we agree to follow rules if the government does X for us.

I am concerned with the attitude as opposed to the action.

If I obey the traffic lights on a road then I am submitting. If ignore a red light and cross when I feel like it I am not submitting. Unless they are trained by humans, pets will do what they feel like. Humans are unique for the vast array of rules they submit to. — Andrew4Handel

No, you are not submitting. That's like saying if I play chess and follow the rules, then I am submitting to them. It's actually a really dumb way to think. There are many reasons why people follow traffic rules and most of them are pragmatic.

Same for most of the rules you've laid out except for following dictatorships which is an unfair example because that might've been true but only it was only achieved through indoctrination and propaganda.

What do you envision as an alternative?

If a student is not thinking that it would be rational to behave in class, he should be praised for it? If someone decides to go around running red lights, we should think that's commendable?

I'm a bit lost as to what you're trying to say.