The Catholic Church has excommunicated the mother, who arranged an abortion for her 9 year old daughter, who was pregnant with twins as a result of rape by her stepfather. There is a heap of controversy over this in the blogosphere, the most insane of which is the Hand Mirror claiming this is evidence the […]
Entries Tagged as 'Ethics'
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
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
Cultural Confusion and Ethical Relativism III
December 6th, 2008 24 Comments
Arguments against Relativism In my previous post I argued that the common arguments for relativism fail. In this post I want to go one step further and suggest there are good reasons for rejecting relativism. Many reasons could be mustered here; I will limit myself to three. Counter Examples Both cultural and individual ethical relativism […]
Tags: Ethics · Louis Pojman · Philosophy of Religion · Relativism
Cultural Confusion and Ethical Relativism II
December 5th, 2008 13 Comments
In my previous post, I set out the differences between relativist and objectivist views of ethics. I noted that objectivist views were widely disparaged in our culture in favour of relativist ones. I now want to raise what, I think, is an obvious question, why should we accept the relativism assumed in much cultural ethical […]
Tags: Ethics · Frances Howard-Snyder · Philosophy of Religion · Relativism · Rodney Stark
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.
