In wake of the return of the stolen victoria crosses and the Police claiming they are “honour bound” to pay the thieves the promised reward not PC argues that it is permissible to lie to an agressor. The standard example in the literature (which PC utilises) goes something like this: You are hiding someone fleeing […]
Entries Tagged as 'Ethics'
Permissible Lies
February 19th, 2008 2 Comments
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Ethics · Lucia Maria · Peter Cresswell · Theology
New Publication
November 21st, 2007 Comments Off on New Publication
I just received word from the Editor of The Journal of Ethics and Medicine that my article “Boonin’s Defense of the Sentience Criteria: A Critique” has been accepted for publication in a future issue (the exact issue is still being decided). There may be some minor amendments made but at present the following is the […]
Tags: Abortion · David Boonin · Ethics · Feticide · Published
The Euthyphro Objection Part III: The Redundancy of God is Good
November 1st, 2007 8 Comments
My first post in this series, The Euthyphro Objection Part I: Against Divine Commands & Avoiding Strawmen, I examined Peter Singer’s version of the Euthyphro argument and demonstrated that it relies upon a strawman. In my Part II I criticised Singer’s utilisation of the arbitrariness objection against divine command theory. Singer’s last objection comes as a rejoinder […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Edward Weirenga · Ethics · Euthyphro Dilemma · God and Morality · Paul Faber · Peter Singer · Philosophy of Religion
The Euthyphro Objection Part II: Arbitrariness
October 31st, 2007 4 Comments
In his work Practical Ethics Singer proposes a version of the Euthyphro dilemma to criticise a divine command theory of ethics, Some theists say that ethics cannot do without religion because the very meaning of “good” is nothing other than “what God approves”. Plato refuted a similar view more than two thousand years ago by […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Ethics · Euthyphro Dilemma · God and Morality · James Rachels · Mane Hajdin · Peter Singer · Philosophy of Religion · Roy Perrett
The Euthyphro Objection Part I: Against Divine Commands & Avoiding Strawmen
October 28th, 2007 2 Comments
Perhaps the most common argument against an appeal to divine commands in ethical reasoning is the Euthyphro dilemma, first articulated by Plato and utilised by numerous critics of divine commands ever since. A representative example of this line of argument occurs in Peter Singer’s widely-acclaimed monograph Practical Ethics. In the first chapter of Practical Ethics, […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Edward Weirenga · Ethics · Euthyphro Dilemma · God and Morality · John Hare · Peter Singer · Philip Quinn · Philosophy of Religion · Robert Adams · William Alston
Viability
October 2nd, 2007 4 Comments
A common argument claims that a fetus is not a human being until it is capable of surviving independently of another individual. Prior to this period, it does not have an independent existence from its mother; hence killing it is not homicide. This position is common in many legal and ethical arguments about the morality […]
Tags: Abortion · David Oderberg · Ethics · Feticide · Susan Sherwin · Viability
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.
Greens, Tasers and Torture
November 29th, 2007 3 Comments
Watching the news the other night, I heard how some UN body had declared that the use of tasers constituted torture. (At least that is how it was reported). Predictably the Green party cited this as a for rejecting the use of Tasers.The implicit argument here seems to go something like this. [1] The use […]
Tags: Ethics · Greens · Torture