It was inevitable. Sooner or later a boat filled with desperate people would set out from India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, whatever, for New Zealand. We have been “protected” to date only by an accident of geography–New Zealand’s relative distance. Australia has faced the problem for decades. A group of Sri Lankan poor (allegedly Tamils previously […]
Entries Tagged as 'Ethics'
Klingon Cloaking Devices Unmasked by Boat People
July 15th, 2011 15 Comments
Tags: Human Rights · Rights and Freedoms · Sri Lankan Boat People
Ethics: What Does God have to do with it? @ Auckland University
July 11th, 2011 4 Comments
World class Ethicists John Hare (Yale Divinity) and Mark Murphy (Georgetown Philosophy) are in town for the Naturalisms in Ethics Conference and the Meeting of the Australasian Philosophy of Religion Association at the University of Auckland where they will be speaking along with New Zealand’s top Ethicists. We leaped on the opportunity to organise the following […]
Tags: Glenn Pettigrove · John Hare · Mark Murphy · Thinking Matters
The Australasian Philosophy of Religion Association Conference @ Auckland University
July 11th, 2011 4 Comments
The Australasian Philosophy of Religion Association (APRA) conference will be running at the University of Auckland from 16-17 July and will feature this blog’s own Matthew Flannagan and our good friend Glenn Peoples. The APRA conference is an annual event usually taking place over two days in mid July. Speakers include: John Bishop (University of Auckland) Trent Dougherty (Baylor […]
Naturalisms in Ethics Conference @ Auckland Uni
July 10th, 2011 10 Comments
The Naturalisms in Ethics conference will be running at the University of Auckland from 14-15 July and will feature this blog’s own Matthew Flannagan. Here is the blurb from organiser Chris Tucker’s page (which includes registration information – see also the Facebook Event page): ‘Naturalism’ is a multiply ambiguous term—hence the title Naturalisms in Ethics— but it is […]
Lawful Authority and Just Wars
June 16th, 2011 66 Comments
A reader pointed me to this interesting post on Pacifism and Just War Theory from Baylor University Philosophy Professor, Alexander Pruss. Interestingly Pruss offers an argument similar to the one I presented at a panel discussion on the ethics of war recently. In this discussion I suggested that traditional Christian Just War Theory follows from […]
Tags: Alexander Pruss · Just War · Pacifism · War Ethics
Pacifism, the Bible and the Sin of Selfishness
May 27th, 2011 20 Comments
‘If someone wants something from us and we do not want to give it to them that is the sin of selfishness and the Bible condemns selfishness.’ This was one of the three points a Christian pacifist speaker made in defending his stance at the panel discussion on War Ethics that Matt mentioned in Pacifism and The […]
Tags: Pacifism · Role of the State · War Ethics
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.
Contra Mundum: Pacifism and Just Wars
July 5th, 2011 27 Comments
Comedian Bill Maher recently berated Christians for being hypocrites for supporting military action against terrorists in his “New Rules” segment on the U.S. TV show Real Time (transcript here). Jesus, Maher contended, was a pacifist; “Jesus lays on that hippie stuff pretty thick. He has lines like, “do not repay evil with evil,” and “do […]
Tags: Bill Maher · Contra Mundum · Investigate Magazine · Just War · Pacifism · War Ethics