Talk:moral authority

Deletion discussion

The following information passed a request for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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moral authority

Seems to mean "an authority with respect to morality". Mglovesfun (talk) 12:43, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

Actual, it's more or less the other way around. It means having authority because one is believed to be moral. The authority can be over anything. In other words, if a person is believed by others to have impeccable morality, those others may follow the commands of the person with "moral authority", even if that person has no formal authority (i.e. doesn't have academic expertise in a subject or hold a political office). bd2412 T 12:55, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

Government/politics and academia only? Really?

Some other sources of formal authority includes management position, property ownership, officially certified competence, legal violence or threat thereof. There may be more. Other, informal sources of authority can include extra-legal violence or threat thereof, status from any source derived, celebrity, a track record of success (or its tokens), acknowledged competence or knowledge (certification-free), friendship with or leverage over others. I don't know what I'm missing.

Moral authority is in no OneLook reference besides Wiktionary. DCDuring TALK 14:27, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

Looking at citations, I think that the definition incorrectly combines two different ideas, The first is of a person or institution (as in, so-and-so is a moral authority) who is respected because they are thought to be moral; and the second is a type of morality itself. For the sense of a particular person, I find things like this:

• 2009, Robert Jefferson Norrell, Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington, p. 431:

  At first Martin Luther King Jr. invoked Booker as a moral authority for King's ethic of love and his posture of passive resistance to white hatred.

• 2010, Dan P. McAdams, George W. Bush and the Redemptive Dream, p. 207:

  No less a moral authority than Elie Wiesel, the celebrated holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, urged President Bush to invade Iraq to defend freedom and liberate the Iraqi people.

• 2011, Scott C. Lowe, Christmas - Philosophy for Everyone: Better Than a Lump of Coal, p. 100:

  Santa is not only a moral authority, like a strict father, but he is also like a nurturing parent, traditionally, a mother.

For the sense of a force detached from individuals, I find things like this:

• 2002, Samuel Edward Finer, The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics, p. 20:

  Thus, when the military breaches the existing political order, it will be forced to claim a moral authority for its actions.

• 2008, Philip B. Heymann, Living the Policy Process, p. 121:

  Victims of palpable injustice enjoy a moral authority that is likely to provide access to even busy players.

• 2011, Daniel Walker, God in a Brothel: An Undercover Journey into Sex Trafficking and Rescue, p. 124:

  In that knowledge I realized that while I lacked any legal authority, I already possessed all the necessary moral authority to confront and interview Watson for his crimes.

I think, therefore, that the problem with this definition is that it needs to be two distinct definitions to reflect two distinct concepts. bd2412 T 14:06, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

• Keep, or so am I inclined; the definition does not seem to be sum of parts. If the usual pro-deletion suspects have not shown up until now, let us err on the side of keep. --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:39, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

  See “moral authority”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.. Delete. DCDuring TALK 18:29, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

  From looking at authority, I actually do not see a sense of authority that, when combined with "moral", yields "moral authority". "The power to enforce rules or give orders" does not do; "Persons in command; specifically, government" does not do either; "A person accepted as a source of reliable information on a subject" does not work either, I think, since a moral authority is not necessarily a source of reliable information on morality. This could be because of a weakness of the authority entry. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:43, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

  Weakness indeed. MWOnline has 12 definitions compared to our 3. Even Webster 1913 had "3. The power derived from opinion, respect, or esteem; influence of character, office, or station, or mental or moral superiority, and the like; claim to be believed or obeyed; as, an historian of no authority; a magistrate of great authority." DCDuring TALK 19:17, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

  Let's not adopt the weaknesses of other dictionaries, then. Keep. bd2412 T 13:40, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

• Let's honor the strength of language: that it can make a virtual infinity number of utterances whose exact meaning depends on context. — This comment was unsigned.

  Under that theory we could delete fire drill or tennis player as utterances whose exact meaning depends on context. However, for various reasons we have decided to keep such things. bd2412 T 15:13, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

  One key difference (key if we have the humility to recognize the possibility that the professional lexicographers at other dictionaries may have nearly as good judgment as we do) is that many other OneLook dictionaries have “fire drill”, in OneLook Dictionary Search., some have “tennis player”, in OneLook Dictionary Search., but none have “moral authority”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.. DCDuring TALK 17:35, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

  I would happily delete fire drill and tennis player. There is some obscure reason I can't remember that made others want to keep tennis player. --WikiTiki89 17:17, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

  Those two should be kept. Purplebackpack89 20:27, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

• Keep: per BD and Dan Purplebackpack89 19:54, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
• Delete. --WikiTiki89 17:17, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
• Delete. — Keφr 20:16, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

{{look}}

For keeping: BD2412, DP, PBP. For deletion: Gloves, DCDuring, Wikitiki89, me. Anyone else? — Keφr 07:38, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

• Keep. The phrase is highly notable. The definition is basically right. It's a hard concept to get a handle on and I'd word it slightly differently, but it's OK. The second definition is... erm, not exactly right, and IMO could be dispensed with (the first definition really covers the same ground), but it's not wrong either. Herostratus (talk) 12:51, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

  Unlike Wikipedia, Wiktionary does not care about notability. --WikiTiki89 13:36, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

  Really, common usage is not an inclusion criteria? Why not? It is for every other dictionary, what's different here? Herostratus (talk) 13:01, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

  @Herostratus Consider the following: "Red car" is a very common phrase, roughly twenty time more common than, say, "notability" and yet “red car”, in OneLook Dictionary Search. shows that many dictionaries do not include it. See also WT:CFI. DCDuring TALK 15:15, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

  At Wikipedia, if something is not notable, it is deleted. Here at Wiktionary, notability does not factor in at all. We essentially have two main criteria: attestation and idiomacity (see WT:CFI). There is no question that moral authority is attested (if it were a question, it would have been nominated at WT:RFV). The question here is whether it is idiomatic. --WikiTiki89 14:43, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

• Keep. Both definitions are valid and that fact alone indicates that this is not a simple, straightforward sum-of-parts term. Further counting against reading this term as SoP is the fact that its meaning was not evident to Mglovesfun when he originally nominated it. I also suspect the term tends to be a bit of puzzler for many people who are not native speakers of English, and that its inclusion here is a valuable service to them. It doesn't really matter whether the term is in other OneLook dictionaries or not. -- · (talk) 06:18, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Your reasoning is specious. The more different meanings writers writing for the same type of audience can intend when they combine two words, the less evidence there is that the term has sufficiently fixed meaning to be said to have entered the lexicon. The two senses, roughly, "authority on the subject of moral matters" and "authority derived from morals" follow two standard ways in which meaning is derived from compounds. There are more ways as well, based on other senses of authority. "sartorial authority" would have the same two meanings and apparently does:

Delete and supply at least some of the missing definitions of authority#Noun that more comprehensive dictionaries have. DCDuring TALK 13:14, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Although I am involved in this discussion, I am loathe to see an RfD stay open for more than a year, as this one now has, and would like to close. At this point, the !vote stands as follows:

Keep

• User:BD2412
• User:Dan Polansky
• User:Herostratus
• User:Purplebackpack89
• User:Talking Point

Delete

• User:DCDuring
• User:Kephir
• User:Mglovesfun
• User:Wikitiki89

Putting aside the argument on the merits of the entry, does anyone disagree that this reflects an absence of consensus to delete? bd2412 T 13:49, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Seems like a pretty clear-cut case of no consensus. --WikiTiki89 15:19, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure that we'll get a consensus on that point. What is a lack of consensus, really? Do we need a BP discussion or a vote on that? DCDuring TALK 15:33, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

• RFD kept. This is a clear-cut no consensus for deletion. --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:20, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

  I knew there would not be consensus. I don't think this is quite the same as an outright keep decision. DCDuring TALK 20:10, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

  Keeping for lack of consensus is standard procedure. --WikiTiki89 20:11, 25 August 2014 (UTC)