In The Autonomy of Ethics David Brink complains that “tradition and scripture may speak but in conflicting ways”;[1] in a endnote he cites a single example, Inconsistency is at stake, for example, when we juxtapose the Old Testament doctrine of an “eye for an eye” (Exodus 21:23, 24; Leviticus 24:19, 20; and Deuteronomy 19:21) and […]
Entries Tagged as 'Ethics'
An Eye for an Eye and Turning the Other Cheek
March 3rd, 2009 11 Comments
Tags: David Brink · David Daube · eye for an eye · Lex Talionis · turn the other cheek
Maori and Pakeha are Not Partners to the Treaty of Waitangi
February 11th, 2009 20 Comments
[For the benefit of our international readership: Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand; Pakeha is a term used to describe Caucasian New Zealanders; The Treaty of Waitangi is a significant founding document of our nation over which many historical and current differences have arisen around its role, interpretation and application.] Recently I read […]
Tags: Jurisprudence · Role of the State · Treaty of Waitangi
Brink on Dialectical Equilibrium
February 5th, 2009 2 Comments
In my last two posts, I have criticised David Brink’s appeal to scripture in order to argue against the appeal to divine commands in ethics. Brink anticpates the kind of argument I have offered and states, A common theistic response to these interpretative puzzles is to endorse the interpretation of tradition and scripture that yields […]
Tags: David Brink · Ethics · Faith and Reason · God and Morality · Hermeneutics
Capital Punishment in the Old Testament: 2
January 27th, 2009 20 Comments
In Capital Punishment in the Old Testament: 1 I suggested that the capital sanctions found in The Torah in most cases were not intended to be carried out, that instead there operated an implicit assumption that a person who committed a serious crime had forfeited their life and hence was to pay a ransom as […]
Tags: Capital Punishment · David Brink · David Instone Brewer · Ethics · Gordon Wenham · Hermeneutics · Old Testament Ethics · Theology
Capital Punishment in the Old Testament: 1
January 25th, 2009 9 Comments
In “The Autonomy of Ethics,” David Brink writes that a literal reading of the Old Testament, [Y]ields problematic moral claims, such as Deuteronomy’s claims that parents can and should stone to death rebellious children (21:18-21) and that the community can and should stone to death any wife whose husband discovers that she was not a […]
Tags: Capital Punishment · David Brink · Ethics · Hermeneutics · Old Testament Ethics · Theology
Bush’s Legacy
January 16th, 2009 42 Comments
I am always slightly disturbed when I encounter Bush-haters amongst my friends. Disturbed not because it surprises me that Bush-hater exist but because my friends are otherwise smart, informed, thinking people who have a healthy degree of scepticism towards the left-wing, anti-conservative values of the media and hollywood; I just don’t get how they can […]
Tags: George Bush · Iraq · US Politics · War Ethics
On a Common Equivocation
January 12th, 2009 6 Comments
Recently I did a post on relativism and in earlier posts I have defended a divine command theory of ethics against various objections. In the comments section Mark V raised an interesting and thoughtful response. I hope Mark does not mind if I pick up on his points because the themes he raises are well […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Ethics · God and Morality · James Cornman · Keith Lehrer · Louise Anthony · Mark V · Patrick Nowell Smith · Philosophy of Religion · Walter Sinnott-Armstrong · William Lane Craig
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.
