Thanks very much for posting that link.
Have you heard of the Franz Jaggerstatter episode? I came across a provoking commentary the other day:
Alan Donagan's critique of Hegel's conception of Sittlichkeit is instructive here. Donagan makes use of the case of Franz Jaggerstatter, noting that the just war doctrine of Catholic moral theology had degenerated in Germany during the Second World War. The terms of this doctrine were clear enough within the tradition of Catholic theology, but they had become a dead letter by the presumption of the community in favour of the claims of the government. Jaggerstatter saw the obvious and would not accept military service. He was hanged. But the local religious authorities assured him that he was wrong; that his duty was to accept military service. And they maintained this judgement even after the war.
Donogan observes:Is it possible to find in this anything but the depravation of the Sittlichkeit of an ethical community whose members had lost the habit of moral self-criticism?...Donogan is not denying that Jaggerstatter's advisers were part of an intellectual tradition which had the resources for correcting their mistake. His point is that this intellectual tradition had ceased to be a part of the lived mores of their community. Deprived of the judgements of the intellectual tradition, moral criticism became impossible.
Hegel disparaged the point of view of morality on the ground that being is abstractly rational; it could find content for its judgements only in the mores of some actual community. The case of Jaggerstatter reveals an opposite process. The moral theory of Catholic Christianity furnished specific precepts on the subject of legitimate war service, which applied to the case in question on the basis of stated facts which were not questioned. But, by recourse to the mores of their actual community, Jaggerstatter's spiritual advisers were able to evaporate the precepts whose applicability to his case they could not dispute. For, according to these mores, apart from such fanciful possibilities as a war with the declared intention of destroying the Church as an institution, no individual citizen was deemed capable of assuring himself that any war his country proposed to wage was unjust. Herre, what is exposed as empty, as lacking specific content, as allowing any filler5 whatsoever, is not Moralitat but Sittlichkeit.-Joseph Boyle, "Natural Law and the Ethics of Traditions" Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays ed. Robert P. George