"God has no grandchildren," the evangelical ex-Marine father of my late friend Chip Howe said, explaining how he surrendered judgment and came to accept Chip's homosexuality.
He was always progressive, but never willing to surrender his judgment to groupthink.
For Murphy, surrender of judgment is consent in the usual sense of voluntary agreement or acceptance.
A partial surrender of judgment may therefore enhance the agent's autonomy overall.
A principled objection to every surrender of judgment is thus self-defeating.
Mark Murphy and Margaret Gilbert have sounded variations on this theme by arguing, in Murphy's case, that "surrender of judgment is a kind of consent" (in Edmundson 1999, p. 320), or, in Gilbert's, that "joint commitment" is an important source of obligations, including political obligations (1993, 2006, 2013).
He added that there are some professional relationships, involving "people who have genuinely surrendered their judgment" to an expert, where licensing may be appropriate.
For two hours on that gleaming Saturday morning last March, my wife, Ruth, and I darted from food stall to food stall, surrendering good judgment in the name of some very curious Kiwi cuisine.
In weighing such concerns, we listen respectfully to the arguments of officials, but we do not surrender our own judgment.
How, Malcomson inquires, did the world's sole superpower surrender its better judgment and squander so much good will?
