Category: Ethics
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Persons and the Moral Relevance of Their Capacities
Those who accept the following Rights Principle (RP) presumably also accept as a codicil thereto a Capacities Principle (CP): RP. All persons have a right to life. CP. All persons have a right to life even at times when they are not exercising any of the capacities whose exercise confers upon them the right to…
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Islam and the Euthyphro Problem
Horace Jeffery Hodges has a couple of informative and well-documented posts, here and here, on the divine will and its limits, if any, in Judaism and Christianity on the one hand, and in Islam, on the other. One way to focus the issue is in terms of the Euthyphro dilemma. The locus classicus is Stephanus…
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‘Could Have Done Otherwise’ Disambiguated
Here again is how Harry Frankfurt formulates the principle of alternate possibilities in his 1969 J. Phil. article: PAP. A person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. It is now time to put 'could have done otherwise' under our logico-linguistic microscopes. The phrase is ambiguous. On…
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Thoughts as Objects of Moral Evaluation: Refining the Thesis
In a comment to Can Mere Thoughts be Morally Wrong? I wrote: There is nothing wrong with the mere occurrence of a thought, any thought, even the thought of killing someone just to get his wallet. For the thought might arise without my willing it to arise. My point is that once it has arisen, once it…
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Can Mere Thoughts Be Morally Wrong?
We begin by provisionally distinguishing among thoughts, words, and deeds. I will assume that most deeds and some words are justifiably morally evaluable, justifiably evaluable as either morally right or morally wrong. The question I want to raise is whether mere thoughts (thoughts that do not actually spill over into words or actions, though they possess the potential to do…
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Sam Harris on Whether Atheists are Evil
In Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), in the section Are Atheists Evil?, Sam Harris writes: If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. (pp. 38-39) Harris then goes on to…
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Religion and the Inculcation of Morality
Many of us internalized the ethical norms that guide our lives via our childhood religious training. We were taught the Ten Commandments, for example. We were not just taught about them, we were taught them. We learned them by heart, and we took them to heart. This early training, far from being the child abuse that A.…
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Morality Private and Public: On Not Confusing Them
Socrates and Jesus are undoubtedly two of the greatest teachers of humanity. Socrates famously maintained that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it, and Jesus, according to MT 5:39, enjoins us to "Resist not the evildoer" and "Turn the other cheek." No one with any spiritual sensitivity can fail to be deeply…
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Amiel on Duty
“Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world while at the same time detaching us from it.” (See here.) This is a penetrating observation, and a nearly perfect specimen of the aphorist’s art. It is terse, true, but not trite. The tip of an iceberg of thought, it invites…