Recently Dr Ian Hassall gave a presentation, on the upcoming referendum on section 59 of the Crimes Act 1961, entitled: How did we come to have a law that supported hitting children? This presentation defends the thesis that mild physical punishment (smacking) is wrong and should remain illegal in New Zealand. In this post I […]
Entries Tagged as 'Ethics'
Fisking Ian Hassall: The Arbitrary Ethical Reasoning on the Smacking Referendum
July 10th, 2009 41 Comments
Tags: David Benatar · Defences · Ethics · Ian Hassall · Moral Discourse · Referendum · s59 · Smacking
John Loftus on Madeleine Flannagan and Women and Other Red Herrings
July 1st, 2009 7 Comments
A few days ago I posted, Sunday Study: Slavery, John Locke and the Bible; in this post I defended an argument proposed by John Locke that the Bible does not support slavery. In that article I quoted from John Loftus’ book “Why I Became an Atheist” as an example of what is typically meant by […]
Tags: Atheism · Christian History · Ethics · John Loftus · Religious History · Theology
Is Abortion Liberal?
May 16th, 2009 22 Comments
A submission to The Christian Libertarian Blog Carnival. Laws permitting abortion on demand are often deemed to be liberal. Political liberals are frequently ardent defenders of such laws. My contention is that support for abortion on the grounds of liberality is mistaken. I argue for this position in a two part series: Is Abortion Liberal? […]
Tags: Abortion · Christian Libertarian Blog Carnival · Classical Liberalism · Ethics · Feticide · Liberalism · Libertarianism
Divine Commands and Intuitions: A Response to Ken Perrott
May 5th, 2009 34 Comments
Ken Perrott from Open Parachute has asked me some questions about my views on morality and divine commands. Views I have repeatedly expressed on this blog. Given that others have from time to time asked me similar questions, and given the length of my response, I have decided to turn my answers into a post. […]
Tags: Atheism · Bad Reasoning · Divine Command Theory · Ethics · God and Morality
With God Anything can be Permitted: Another Bad Argument against Theistic Morality
April 28th, 2009 30 Comments
Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov’s famously contended that if God does not exist then anything is permissible. Ken over at Open Parachute disagrees and goes one step further and argues that the shoe is on the other foot. Ken maintains that theistic accounts of obligation lead to an “extreme form of moral relativism” and in fact, Dostoevsky’s […]
Tags: Atheism · Bad Reasoning · Divine Command Theory · Ethics · God and Morality
Response to Richard Chappell’s "Pro-Life Pro Zombie"
April 22nd, 2009 5 Comments
Thialias has asked me to respond to “Pro-Life Pro Zombie” written by kiwi ex-pat philosopher Richard Chappell, the author of Philosophy et cetera. In this post Richard, as I understand it, set up a thought experiment where he asked readers to imagine a world where beings exist that are physically identical to us in every […]
Published: Abortion and Capital Punishment UPDATED
April 21st, 2009 13 Comments
Heh! I just discovered on Cambridge Journals that my publication for the Spring 2009 edition of Think: A Journal of the Royal Institute for Philosophy is online. You can download the pdf here, Abortion and Capital Punishment: A Response to Beverly Harrison. UPDATE: As some people are having trouble with the direct link to the […]
Tags: Abortion · Christian History · Ethics · Published
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.
