[davem]

Ok, I accept that in making my points I have presented other's points in too extreme a way, but I'm not sure I can go along with all the distinctions you make. When Tolkien has Aragorn say:

'Good & ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among elves & Dwarves & another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.'

He is surely stating that in his view morality is not subjective - he says a man must discern the diference between good & ill, rather than choose for himself. The implication is that the Good exists objectively, & is not something we must decide on for ourselves. This seems to imply that we don't have freedom to decide what is good, only to discern it & live up to it. So, while we may have 'different perspectives, beliefs and experiences ' we are not free to use them as an excuse to decide what constitutes the Good.

So how much weight should we give to our own beliefs? In Tolkien's view it seems that even our personal perspectives & beliefs can be 'wrong', out of synch with the Good, & if so they have to be changed. This was my point about, as far as possible, putting aside the baggage we bring with us & listening to what the artist is saying, in order to be able to discern the Truth which is 'out there'. In other words, we may have 'different perspectives, beliefs and experiences' but as Aragorn tells Eomer, that's no excuse for not acknowleging the 'facts' & doing the right thing.

So from Tolkien's perspective its not correct to say:

if someone was to read LotR and decide that it justified unprovoked attacks on Arabic people simply because the human allies of Sauron came from the east of Middle-earth, that would be unacceptable from the point of view of the moral consensus.

because it wouldn't simply be unacceptable from the point of view of the moral consensus, it would be wrong from the point of view of the Good, whatever the moral consensus happened to be, because the 'moral consensus' only has value to the extent to which it corresponds to the Good.