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Entries Tagged as 'God and Morality'

The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Response to Erik Wielenberg (Part three)

October 8th, 2019 Comments Off on The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Response to Erik Wielenberg (Part three)

In Part One, I expounded the Psychopath objection to divine command meta-ethics (DCM) that has recently been defended by Erik Wielenberg. Wielenberg argues as follows: R1) If God commands a person S to do act A, this command imposes an obligation on S to do A, only if S is capable of recognising the requirement […]

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The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Response to Erik Wielenberg (Part two)

September 11th, 2019 Comments Off on The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Response to Erik Wielenberg (Part two)

In my last post, I expounded the Psychopath objection to divine command meta-ethics (DCM) that has recently been defended by Erik Wielenberg. To recap. Wielenberg suggests that my response to his earlier “reasonable unbeliever’s objection” relies on the following principle: R) God commands person S to do act A only if S is capable of […]

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The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Response to Erik Wielenberg (part one)

September 3rd, 2019 Comments Off on The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Response to Erik Wielenberg (part one)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iVyVJAMiOY.

Recently, Erik Wielenberg has developed a novel objection to divine command meta-ethics (DCM). DCM “has the implausible implication that psychopaths have no moral obligations and hence their evil acts, no matter how evil, are morally permissible” (Wielenberg (2008), 1). Wielenberg develops this argument in response to some criticisms of his earlier work. One of the […]

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IS A FETUS A HUMAN BEING? Part one: Viability

June 7th, 2019 1 Comment

This is one of a series of posts based on a class I teach for level 3 NCEA Religious Studies. In the last few posts we saw that most of the Christian religious tradition sketched the following argument against feticide; Premise [1] Killing a human being without justification violates the law of God. Premise [2] […]

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FETICIDE IN CHRISTIAN MORAL THOUGHT (Part Four) : Feticide in the Reformed Protestant Tradition

May 28th, 2019 Comments Off on FETICIDE IN CHRISTIAN MORAL THOUGHT (Part Four) : Feticide in the Reformed Protestant Tradition

In our last post we saw how Medieval Christian’s adopted the same position on abortion we saw developed in Alexandrian Judaism and by Patristic theologians. We also saw how this position found its way into European and English law.  Of course during the medieval period, Christian’s in Europe were Catholic.  However, during the sixteenth and […]

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PART THREE: FETICIDE IN CHRISTIAN MORAL THOUGHT (Part three) : The Medieval Period

May 25th, 2019 Comments Off on PART THREE: FETICIDE IN CHRISTIAN MORAL THOUGHT (Part three) : The Medieval Period

I teach NCEA Religious Studies, at level three, one standard is to “Analyse the response of a religious tradition to a contemporary ethical issue”. Officially students have to describe the response a religious tradition has made to a moral issue. Our school like a lot of schools looks at Christian responses to abortion. Because I […]

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Brad Hooker and Philip Quinn

January 10th, 2019 6 Comments

Most versions of Divine command meta-ethics  (DCM) contend that the property of being morally required is informatively identical with the property of being commanded by God.[1] A common objection to divine command meta-ethics is the horrendous deeds objection.  We can formalise this objection as follows: [P1] If DCM is true, then if God commands unjust […]

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