A consequentialist assesses the ultimate worth of all the various features of our ethical lives according to whether or not they bring about some specific intrinsic good or goods that the consequentialist judges to be of primary value. All the various valuable features of our lives have their ultimate value with respect to how they [...]
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Category Archives: Metaethics
Moral Psychologist Joshua D. Greene and Experimental Philosopher Joshua Knobe
July 15, 2010 – 5:29 pmBelow is a great dialogue between Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene and Yale “experimental philosopher” Joshua Knobe laying out some of the basics of moral psychology. I took notes as I watched the video, summarizing the major points for myself and for your use, dear blogreader. It will be easier to just watch the video, of [...]
How Our Morality Realizes Our Humanity
July 11, 2010 – 7:21 pmIn a previous post, I discussed the intrinsic connection between being and goodness and between functional activity and being. I argued, for example that the various components of a heart need to function as a heart to be a heart and similarly that a human being must act morally to realize her humanity. Specifically, I [...]
On God As The Source Of Being But Not Of Evil
July 9, 2010 – 11:15 amIntroduction This post is a long one but an important one for understanding what sophisticated Roman Catholic philosophers have traditionally meant when they have said that “God is good” and that the existence of evil is not to be taken as counter-evidence to their belief in God’s goodness. Very often we atheists are dismissed as [...]
On The Intrinsic Connection Between Being And Goodness
July 8, 2010 – 11:00 amAll things, insofar as they are, have goodness. This is because, for any existent thing whatsoever, to be is necessarily better than not being (regardless of whether a given existent thing consciously acknowledges this or is even capable of thinking about it at all). This goodness is partly a function of the fact that every [...]
A Dictatorship Of Relativism?
July 3, 2010 – 9:20 pmBBC Radio 4 analyzes the pope’s catchphrase, “a dictatorship of relativism”, used for describing the secular West. Here’s the program description: The idea that no one has a monopoly on the truth seems to be fixed in the modern Western psyche. But it’s an idea that is under attack. Pope Benedict claims that we are [...]
Disambiguating Faith: Why Faith Is Unethical (Or "In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence")
June 21, 2010 – 5:18 amA couple of weeks ago, I argued that there was a real distinction between “lacking a belief in any God or gods” on the one hand and “believing there is no God (or gods)” on the other hand. Primarily I saw the heart of the distinction as resting with the difference between on the one [...]
Some Suspicions About The Superiority Of Liberal Moral Values
June 18, 2010 – 11:27 pmEarlier today, I drew attention to Greta Christina’s article formulating some ideas she picked up from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. If you have already read either or both of those posts, you can just skip the next two paragraphs meant to catch up new readers. The Goldstein/Greta Christina argument built off of Jonathan Haidt’s theory of [...]
Are Liberal Values Objectively Better Than Conservative Ones?
June 18, 2010 – 2:55 pmIn recent years, Jonathan Haidt has been influentially arguing that there are five essential modules in the mind from which human moral concerns originate. He has made this claim in several places, most prominently among philosophers in his contribution to Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (from Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s groundbreaking [...]
Are Divine Command Theory And Objective Morality Mutually Exclusive Concepts?
June 9, 2010 – 11:32 pmLuke Muelhauser confronts William Lane Craig with the inconsistency between his divine command interpretation of morality, according to which things are moral or immoral as solely determined by God’s calling them as such, on the one hand, and his insistence that in this way God is the source of “objective morality”: But let us say [...]
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