Suppose you asked me what today’s date was and I answered that the Maori Electorate seats in Parliament should be scrapped. You would quite rightly wonder what I was on. The question of what the date is is a completely different question as to whether a particular social policy is just. Oddly enough, however, when […]
Entries Tagged as 'Ethics'
Cultural Confusion and Ethical Relativism I
December 2nd, 2008 19 Comments
Tags: Ethics · Frances Howard-Snyder · Philosophy of Religion · Relativism · Robert Adams
Abortion and Child Abuse
November 27th, 2008 1 Comment
Bloggers WhaleOil and David Farrar are in disagreement over some comments made by Garth George in the New Zealand Herald regarding abortion and child abuse. Garth George says: I have said it before and I say it again: The number one cause of abuse against women and children is abortion. David Farrar says: I disagree. […]
Tags: Abortion · Child Abuse · David Farrar · Ethics · Feticide · Garth George · New Zealand Herald · Susan Sherwin · Whale Oil
Why am I a Bigot?
November 26th, 2008 16 Comments
I am a Theologian with a strong background in Philosophy; apart from Philosophical Theology, my particular area of interest is Ethics. Given this, I often post my thoughts and reflections on moral issues of various persuasions on this blog. I have discussed the morality of warfare, whether it is sometimes permissible to lie, the morality […]
Tags: Bad Reasoning · Ethics · Feticide · Homosexual Conduct · Religion in Public Life
On the Meta-Euthyphro Objection
October 18th, 2008 8 Comments
According to proponents of the Euthyphro Objection, defenders of a Divine Command Theory of Ethics face a dilemma, actions are morally-required either because: (i) God commands them; or, (ii) God commands them because they are morally-required. The latter (ii) entails that actions are right and wrong independently of God’s commands and as such, a Divine […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Ethics · Euthyphro Dilemma · God and Morality · Philosophy of Religion
Patrick Nowell Smith on Divine Commands
April 15th, 2008 2 Comments
In a widely-anthologised essay Morality: Religious and Secular. Patrick Nowell Smith offers a influential criticism of “religious morality” It is clear from his definition of religious morality that it is Voluntarism ( or a Divine Command Theory of Ethics) he has in mind. Smith states that the religious moralist has “assumed that just as the […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Ethics · God and Morality · Patrick Nowell Smith · Philosophy of Religion
Abortion and Brain Death: A Response to Farrar
March 19th, 2008 26 Comments
David Farrar of Kiwiblog weighs in on the abortion debate. I have met David a couple of times and worked with him on several issues and I have a lot of time for him but on this issue we disagree. Given how widely read Farrar’s blog is, and seeing the ethics of killing a fetus […]
Tags: Abortion · Brain Death · David Farrar · Ethics · Feticide
Theology, Morality and Reason
March 1st, 2008 Comments Off on Theology, Morality and Reason
In my previous post I mediated on the morality of lying. I suggested that a divine command theorist: a person who believes that the property of moral wrongness is the property of being contrary to God’s commands does not need to affirm that lying is wrong in any and all circumstances. In updating the post […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Ethics · Faith and Reason · Peter Cresswell · Theology
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.
