I'm not sure whether this comment is intended to be a critique of Emerson or simply a note about a thought process that you might expect would arise when trying to embody Emerson's philosophy, but either way, I think it's worth noting that blind rebellion would not be something that Emerson advised.

The point of Emerson's philosophy is that one ought neither slavishly prostrate oneself in service of an institution, nor become obsessed with attempting to eradicate institutions.

>And so Emerson tells us to shun the words in the books, to shun the words of authorities and to attune ourselves to this inner voice to what our heart tells us to do. Following the course of this inner star you may appear inconsistent to those around you — today you are doing this and the next day you are onto something else. But, in an image that has been lodged in my mind since I first read Self-Reliance Emerson writes:

>“The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions.”

There's no mention of tearing down existing authorities. The prescription is merely shunning them; that is, ensuring they remain external to you. One needn't tear down institutions if the goal is merely to ignore them (unless it becomes clear endeavoring against a particular institution is something that resonates with your sense of self).

In other words: above all, follow your intuition, your Aboriginal Self. Rejecting institutions need only go so far as what would be necessary to extricate yourself from them, so you might have the freedom to follow that Aboriginal Self, but getting caught up in remaking society in your own image would be just as false as remaining trapped within society. After all, you'd still be turning to something external to yourself as your guiding principle, rather than your own natural connection to your internal wisdom.

I don't necessarily think that the answer people give to a question is correlated with the factual answer to that question, but I do think there may be value in looking for those questions for which consistent answer profiles are given across human populations. In other words: killing is thought of as a taboo basically everywhere you go, which implies that there may be some scientific underpinning to that taboo. Eating pork or beef is thought of as very taboo to some, but very normal to others, implying that the taboo is less scientific than particular.

In the latter scenario, when there is wide variance in the answers across individuals and populations, I think this method is useless in trying to ascertain truth. Another example is one someone else pointed out, the perceived morality of gay marriage. That is very much something that varies across locale and time, which means just asking people whether it's moral cannot answer the question of the truth of its morality.

My thought was that it could be an interesting idea to understand where there are seeming convergences to moral questions in many populations and use those to delve for where there may be certain moral truths. But it sounds like the author would rather apply the method of asking people what they want for basically everything, and that doesn't seem robust at all.

Hmm. And, to be fair to my hypothetical, it was once believed that left-handedness was evil, which is one of the reasons why the word "sinister" has negative connotations to this day.

So that's the error of this line of reasoning: not that there can be no scientific basis for shared human moral values, but that it is impossible to empirically separate those shared moral human values with a scientific underpinning from individual or societal norms, which are subject to change significantly over time.

And there are groups that intentionally induce extreme pain in young boys as as a rite of passage in to manhood.

That doesn't mean there isn't a biological basis for the near-universal human preference to avoid pain.

So there can be nothing of value to be gained, scientifically or otherwise, from subjectively asking people which hand they prefer? That strikes me as false.

We have a strong understanding, for instance, that because raising a child is an intensely resource-heavy endeavor for humans, cheating on a spouse is generally considered unethical. Thus asking people, "Do you think cheating on your spouse is unethical?" will result in responses that align with that understanding. Simply saying, "Well most people say they prefer that their spouses not cheat on them, but we can't assign any value to that finding because we can't determine whether that's true objectively," isn't accurate.

Maybe I'm not understanding the objection. I could sort of see it that assigning a particular meaning for why people answered a moral question in a certain way is itself unscientific - there are several possible explanation why a person could think killing another is morally wrong, for instance, and it would be difficult to say which of them is the scientific explanation for why humans believe killing to be wrong.

But to say that we cannot glean anything broader from asking people moral questions and finding which questions generate strong agreements among people seems incorrect.

>This just shows what their preference is. It does not entail anything beyond their preference.

Hang on, I think this needs expansion. If, for instance, you asked a large group of people whether they were left handed, right handed, or ambidextrous, the result wouldn't just be dismissed as "That's their preference." We don't understand handedness, but we do know that there is some kind of biological imperative on humans which drives both preference for one hand over another and a ~90/10 ratio of right handedness to left handedness across all human populations.

Why can we automatically assume there is no analogous imperative for moral decisions?