My reply to Jekylldoc about his comment on the blog: What Is Honorable About Your Honor Brett Kavanaugh?

We... “are committed (it would seem) to think of conscience as an organ that will react without hope for rewards and without fear of punishment.” ~Hannah Arendt

My reply to Jekylldoc about his comment on the blog:

What Is Honorable About Your Honor Brett Kavanaugh?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/thoughtfulpastor/2018/09/24/what-honorable-about-brett-kavanaugh/

In an age of neo-fascism , MHO, a few things become clear to me...
"They have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing': Catch-22.

Hannah Arendt, a refugee from, and a student of, a time and place in which

" …the few rules and standards according to which men used to tell right from wrong, and which were invoked to judge or justify others and themselves,.… without much notice… collapsed almost overnight, and then it was as though morality suddenly stood revealed... 
 as a set of mores, customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with hardly more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of an individual or a people."

I found an article today that, MHO, puts this conversation a little farther along...

/It’s not necessarily the case that having roots means that you’re wisely-rooted, but it does mean that you have a stake in your own personality and self-imposed limits on what you are capable of doing. Without these roots, you have no limits, you are capable of anything, and your own character is a matter of indifference to you. In short: you are dangerous.

Thinking, which is to say being in dialog with yourself, is what gives you this stake in your own character — it “results in conscience as its by-product.” You don’t want to be spending your time in dialog with a monster: 

“If I do wrong I am condemned to live together with a wrongdoer in an unbearable intimacy.”
~Hannah Arendt

 This is of such importance that, as Socrates put it, it is better to be wronged than to do wrong.

If you and the self you are in dialog with can achieve this crucial harmony by agreeing to a comfortable lie, and the alternative is to be in disharmony over an uncomfortable truth, what’s holding you back from embracing the lie?

 if you think you can impose your preferences by force, you have no need to appeal to some universal standard of right and wrong, you just do your thing; on the other hand, if you are defenseless, big talk may be all you’ve got.

of today’s villains, the torturers and terrorists and demagogues, who’s to say they don’t have their own sixth sense [their version of a conscience or lack thereof conventional, agreed-upon,  civil societal definition of right and wrong] that they aren’t enacting the character they admire? Arendt said that this “sixth sense” is misleading: “these feelings indicate conformity and nonconformity, they don’t indicate morality.”

... at some point I must feel that I wouldn’t want to live with myself if I were to do X, Y, or Z. 

Because i would feel guilty, I would be repulsed at myself, all of this because of this same unreliable ethical sixth sense [conscience] . I also can’t help but feel that there are reasons why some things are right and others wrong that lie outside of me —

Could it really be that there is nothing more at stake in moral questions than my own opinion of myself?/

~Dave Sniggle
https://sniggle.net/TPL/index5.php?entry=26Sep06

We... “are committed (it would seem) to think of conscience as an organ that will react without hope for rewards and without fear of punishment.” ~Hannah Arendt