even if I don't agree with the laws; I should encourage their upkeep; and signal their upkeep wherever possible
I strongly disagree. Laws are made for a variety of reasons, some of them are quite bad and/or immoral. I feel that the inclination to "encourage the upkeep" of a law just because it's a law is an entirely wrong way to go about it.
Some laws are bad and for them to go away they need to encounter pushback.
The following is not a well reasoned out thought: where there are options of actions in life including:
Breaking a "not good law"
Protesting a "not good law"
Campaigning to change a "not good law"
Encouraging others to also break a "not good law"
I would not be encouraging anyone that breaking said law is the best way to have it changed.
Where I don't think restriction on lockpicking is a good law to have; I would not be encouraging anyone to take up lockpicking in protest of the law that I don't think is a go...
[CW: This post talks about personal experience of moral dilemmas. I can see how some people might be distressed by thinking about this.]
Have you ever had to decide between pushing a fat person onto some train tracks or letting five other people get hit by a train? Maybe you have a more exciting commute than I do, but for me it's just never come up.
In spite of this, I'm unusually prepared for a trolley problem, in a way I'm not prepared for, say, being offered a high-paying job at an unquantifiably-evil company. Similarly, if a friend asked me to lie to another friend about something important to them, I probably wouldn't carry out a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. It seems that I'm happy to adopt consequentialist policy, but when it comes to personal quandaries where I have to decide for myself, I start asking myself about what sort of person this decision makes me. What's more, I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad heuristic in a social context.
It's also noteworthy (to me, at least) that I rarely experience moral dilemmas. They just don't happen all that often. I like to think I have a reasonably coherent moral framework, but do I really need one? Do I just lead a very morally-inert life? Or have abstruse thought experiments in moral philosophy equipped me with broader principles under which would-be moral dilemmas are resolved before they reach my conscious deliberation?
To make sure I'm not giving too much weight to my own experiences, I thought I'd put a few questions to a wider audience:
- What kind of moral dilemmas do you actually encounter?
- Do you have any thoughts on how much moral judgement you have to exercise in your daily life? Do you think this is a typical amount?
- Do you have any examples of pedestrian moral dilemmas to which you've applied abstract moral reasoning? How did that work out?
- Do you have any examples of personal moral dilemmas on a Trolley Problem scale that nonetheless happened?
The Username/password anonymous account is, as always, available.