In a previous post, I observed that Walter Sinnott-Armstrong concedes that secular accounts of moral obligation cannot vindicate the thesis that agents always have decisive (all-things-considered) reasons to avoid wrongdoing. To mitigate this problem, he argues: Is this limitation a problem for secular accounts of morality? I doubt that, too. If we demand this extreme […]
Entries Tagged as 'God and Morality'
Sinnott-Armstrong on God, Secularism and “reasons” to be moral. Part Three: Can Religious theories answer the question, “Why be moral?”
September 13th, 2025 1 Comment
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Dualism of Practical Reason · God and Morality · Walter Sinnott-Armstrong · Why be Moral?
Sinnott-Armstrong on God, Secularism and “reasons” to be moral. Part One:
September 3rd, 2025 Comments Off on Sinnott-Armstrong on God, Secularism and “reasons” to be moral. Part One:
In his book Morality Without God, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues that a secular account of the nature of moral properties—namely, that wrongness is constituted by the property of harming others—is preferable to a theistic account, in which wrongness is identified with the property of being contrary to God’s commands Chapter 6 is entitled “Why be moral?” In […]
Tags: Dualism of Practical Reason · God and Morality · Walter Sinnott-Armstrong · Why be Moral?
Published: Theological Utilitarianism, Supervenience, and Intrinsic Value
April 14th, 2023 Comments Off on Published: Theological Utilitarianism, Supervenience, and Intrinsic Value
My paper, “Theological Utilitarianism, Supervenience, and Intrinsic Value” has been published in a special issue of Religions, devoted to the topic God and Ethics. The abstract is as follows: Erik Wielenberg has argued that robust realism can account for the “common-sense moral belief” that “some things distinct from God are intrinsically good”. By contrast, theological stateism […]
Tags: Erik Wielenberg · George Berkeley · God and Morality · Intrinsic Value · supervenience · Theological Utilitarianism · Theological Voluntarism · William Paley
Thinking Matters Talk: Does Morality Need God? Part Three:
September 8th, 2022 3 Comments
This year the New Zealand apologetics organization Thinking Matters ran a “Confident Christianity Conference” in Auckland. I was asked to speak at this conference on the topic. Does Morality Need God? Below is a slightly streamlined version of the talk I gave. This brings me to my second contention: If God exists, a divine command theory […]
Tags: Anything goes Objection · Arbitrariness Objection · Divine Command Theory · Euthyphro Dilemma · God and Morality · Graham Oppy · Nathan L King · Plato
Thinking Matters Talk: Does Morality Need God? Part One
August 24th, 2022 Comments Off on Thinking Matters Talk: Does Morality Need God? Part One
This year the New Zealand apologetics organization Thinking Matters, ran a “Confident Christianity Conference” in Auckland. I was asked to speak at this conference on the topic. Does Morality Need God? Below is a slightly streamlined version of the talk I gave. “If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.” These words from Ivan […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · God and Morality · John Stuart Mill · Peter Singer · Robert Adams
Does the Incommensurability of Prudential and Impartial rationality avoid the dualism of Practical Reason?
August 14th, 2021 Comments Off on Does the Incommensurability of Prudential and Impartial rationality avoid the dualism of Practical Reason?
I have been discussing the dualism of practical reason. As I understand it, this is an inference from three premises: [1] We always have most reason to do what is morally required [2] An act is morally required if and only if it is impartially demanded: demanded by rules justified from a perspective of impartial […]
Tags: Derek Parfit · Dualism of Practical Reason · God and Morality · Henry Sidgwick · Peter Bryne · Stephen Layman
Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Dilemma: Part III
May 16th, 2021 Comments Off on Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Dilemma: Part III
This is a talk I gave to the Philosophy Club at Glendale Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, this weekend. The talk was followed by a long discussion with some faculty, students at the college, and others who zoomed in. In this talk, I introduced and defended a divine command theory of ethics. I divided the talk into […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Euthyphro Dilemma · God and Morality · Graham Oppy · Russ Shafer Landau · Stephen Sullivan
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.
