I’ve been thinking recently about the moral issues surrounding immigration. This is partly because it’s an issue I’ve never really studied in depth, and partly because it’s become a massive political football. Here’s a thought that came to me. As I understand it, the right of a refugee to seek asylum in international law has […]
Entries from September 29th, 2025
Some subversive thoughts on immigration
September 29th, 2025 Comments Off on Some subversive thoughts on immigration
Tags: immigration · Refugees
Sinnott-Armstrong on God, Secularism and “reasons” to be moral. Part Three: Can Religious theories answer the question, “Why be moral?”
September 13th, 2025 1 Comment
In a previous post, I observed that Walter Sinnott-Armstrong concedes that secular accounts of moral obligation cannot vindicate the thesis that agents always have decisive (all-things-considered) reasons to avoid wrongdoing. To mitigate this problem, he argues: Is this limitation a problem for secular accounts of morality? I doubt that, too. If we demand this extreme […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Dualism of Practical Reason · God and Morality · Walter Sinnott-Armstrong · Why be Moral?
Sinnott-Armstrong on God, Secularism and “reasons” to be moral. Part two: Do unselfish reasons answer the question, “Why be moral?”
September 8th, 2025 Comments Off on Sinnott-Armstrong on God, Secularism and “reasons” to be moral. Part two: Do unselfish reasons answer the question, “Why be moral?”
*** Walter Sinnott-Armstrong discusses the following objection: “Harming others is sometimes in some people’s best interest, even considering probable costs. In those cases, some theists say that only a divine threat of Hell provides a reason to be moral. Since atheists and agnostics do not believe in God, they do not believe in divine retribution […]
Tags: Dualism of Practical Reason · Hell · Mark Murphy · Walter Sinnott-Armstrong · Why be Moral?
Michael Huemer on Wokeness
September 8th, 2025 Comments Off on Michael Huemer on Wokeness
Political Philosopher Michael Huemer weighs in on the question: what is wokeness? I have been known to describe the essence of wokism as “reverse bigotry”. In the past, various forms of bigotry were common: prejudice against blacks, against women, against gays, against transgender people, and more. Wokism proposes, rather than to eliminate bigotry, to reverse […]
Tags: Michael Huemer · Political Correctness · Political Philosophy
Sinnott-Armstrong on God, Secularism and “reasons” to be moral. Part One:
September 3rd, 2025 Comments Off on Sinnott-Armstrong on God, Secularism and “reasons” to be moral. Part One:
In his book Morality Without God, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues that a secular account of the nature of moral properties—namely, that wrongness is constituted by the property of harming others—is preferable to a theistic account, in which wrongness is identified with the property of being contrary to God’s commands Chapter 6 is entitled “Why be moral?” In […]
Tags: Dualism of Practical Reason · God and Morality · Walter Sinnott-Armstrong · Why be Moral?
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
Goodbye NCEA, Farewell, Get lost, Good Riddance
September 21st, 2025 Comments Off on Goodbye NCEA, Farewell, Get lost, Good Riddance
Some readers of this blog will know that I work as a secondary school teacher. Recently, several people have asked my opinion on the government’s decision to ditch the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). My thoughts follow. When I was at teachers’ college, we were taught that New Zealand had the best curriculum in the […]
Tags: NCEA