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Moral authority has thus also been defined as the "fundamental assumptions that guide our perceptions of the world". [3] An individual or a body of people who are seen as communicators of such principles but which does not have the physical power to enforce them on the unwilling are also spoken of as having or being a moral authority.
The notion that individuals require a “visible power to keep them in awe” - to maintain peace and safety through enforcement of law - underpins Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty, which proposes that a sovereign ruler (with authority to govern the people) is fundamental to any type of commonwealth. [10]
In sociology, authority is the legitimate or socially approved power which one person or a group possesses and practices over another. The element of legitimacy is vital to the notion of authority and is the main means by which authority is distinguished from the more general concept of power. Power can be exerted by the use of force or violence.
Ethics is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy, it investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. Its main branches include normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics. Normative ethics aims to find general principles that govern how people should act.
Charismatic authority grows out of the personal charm or the strength of an individual personality. [2] It was described by Weber in a lecture as "the authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace (charisma)"; he distinguished it from the other forms of authority by stating "Men do not obey him [the charismatic ruler] by virtue of tradition or statute, but because they believe in him."
The rise of Islam, based on both the Qur'an and Muhammad strongly altered the power balances and perceptions of origin of power in the Mediterranean region. Early Islamic philosophy emphasized an inexorable link between science and religion , and the process of ijtihad to find truth —in effect all philosophy was " political " as it had real ...
The adverse opinion holds that the need for authority stems from social inequality. In a class society , those who hold positions of power and authority are among the upper class . Norms differ for each class because the members of each class were raised differently and hold different sets of values.
In contrast to the dominant theories of morality in psychology at the time, the anthropologist Richard Shweder developed a set of theories emphasizing the cultural variability of moral judgments, but argued that different cultural forms of morality drew on "three distinct but coherent clusters of moral concerns", which he labeled as the ethics ...