2015 was the year of unusual predication. What kind of thing I am mattered more than ever. Consider the following: “I am black”“I am a woman”“I am French” It was not obvious what it was that made a person any of these things. In ordinary speech we assume that some fact about the world makes a property ascription such as the above statements true about the entity we are referring to. However, the claims made by many people in 2015 were apparently fact-free claims. A man claimed to be a woman, Englishmen claimed to be Frenchmen and a white woman claimed to be a black woman. Let’s think about gender for a minute.…
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A Case for Punishment
“Lock ’em up!” Punishment, in our culture, conjures up images of a Dickensian, authoritarian and bleak society, one marked by shouting and hitting. While there is no doubt that evil people use punishment as an excuse for cruelty, I’d like to suggest that punishment itself is morally justified. Much as I’d like a world without punishment, I don’t think we can have it if that same world has moral evil in it. So, I’d like to go against the grain: punishment is right, not always and not every kind and certainly not with hatred in the heart, but justified in a fundamental way. Actually, I’d like to go a tad…
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Are Human Beings Basically Good?
Good People All the Way Through? What does it mean to say that humans are basically good? It is by no means an immediately obvious statement. On some days, days like we have all seen in recent weeks, the contrary appears far more likely. What is usually meant by it is that people intend to be good: people want to be good, want others to be good, and want others to think they are good. Perhaps, by basic, we mean something like essential: there is some essential, intrinsic feature of human personality that is good. All the mess, the evil in the world, is really done by those with good…
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Equality plus Evil equals Confusion
George Marsden once wrote: “The sensibilities of Christians toward the poor and the weak have been dulled by the very success of the assimilation of these same sensibilities by the wider Western culture and lately world culture.” (George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, p. 93). In other words, they are taking your stuff and you are letting them. Consider the fantastically trendy value: equality. Christians, who once stood at the forefront of championing equality, are now suspicious of it. The problem is not with equality itself, but with what it is mixed with. Equality has been rent from its theological mornings and now lies at the heart of a dangerous,…
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Why Bill Nye is Wrong
Bill Nye Bill Nye argues that an abortion is analogous to an egg that does not attach to a woman’s uterine wall (here). So… If a fertilized egg is a human, then the woman is responsible for the death of any human that does not attach to a uterine wall. The woman is not responsible for the death of the human. Therefore the fertilized egg is not a human and abortion is justifiable. This is a bad analogy. An abortion is not analogous to an egg that does not attach to a woman’s uterine wall. No one is blaming anyone for miscarriages or for fertilized eggs not attaching to the…
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Virtue Dilemma
How do virtue ethicists know what the virtues are? The problem for virtue ethicists can be stated in a dilemma: Either a virtue is known when an act is carried out by a virtuous person or they are known by some quality in the act not in the agent. If a virtue is known when an act is carried out by a virtuous person then we still don’t know what makes the act virtuous and if we don’t know what makes the act virtuous we don’t know what a virtue is. If, on the other hand, we know virtues by some quality in the act, then it is not virtue…
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O’Donovan’s Love Dilemma
In The Resurrection and Moral Order Oliver O’Donovan asks us to consider what we mean by love as a rule for life. Do we mean, on the one hand, that love is a summary and includes the rest of moral law? Or, on the other hand, do we mean that love is a priority over all other laws? The latter involves responding to a moral dilemma by doing what is considered the most loving act even while an alternative action might be more justified on other grounds. The former may involve suggesting that a particular course of action is justified by a moral law and, though we might not like the…
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Babies and Lions: Why What We See Doesn’t Always Change What We Believe
The picture of a dead lion and the videos of Planned Parenthood workers went head to head this past month. Who won? Time will tell. One thing we do know is that evidence, the type of evidence you can see and hear, doesn’t always change a person’s mind. “How can anyone, any human being, see that poor defenseless lion and feel no moral outrage?” some people said. “No one with any moral scruples can watch the Planned Parenthood videos and remain a supporter of such an organization,” others cried. Yet, for some reason, many people defy the supposedly obvious evidence. Are they mad, irrational or psychopathic? I suppose many people…