suggest that having decisions made by a group that tends not to care about conservative values like respect for authority, group loyalty, and various taboos is far better than those usually made. This is partly because it would better suit my own preferences but also because each of those differences from the norm tends towards deciding what is best for the group rather than best for the leader or best for signalling allegiance to the leader.
Given that you are explicitly disregarding the group's ethical standards, how are you defining "best for the group"?
From Michael Eisen's blog:
Yuval Levin, former Executive Director of the President's Council on Bioethics, has an op-ed in Tuesday's Washington Post arguing that Obama's new stem cell policy is dangerous. Levin does not argue that stem cell research is bad. Rather he is upset that Obama did not dictate which uses of stem cells are appropriate, but rather asked the National Institutes of Health to draft a policy on which uses of stem cells are appropriate:
Lost in this superficially unobjectionable - if banal - assertion of the complexity of ethical issues involving science is Levin's (and many other bioethicists) credo: that the moral complexity of scientific issues means that scientists should not make decisions about them.