When marriage is debated the disagreement comes down to definition. I don’t mean what the definition of marriage is (that is what we disagree about). I mean how we get a definition in the first place. Is there some independent standard by which our definitions are proved good? Can we point at some authoritative definition and say, “see, there, that’s what marriage is.”? Can we look at a couple and say, “marriage is that”? Or is marriage something we purely stipulate? Does the Supreme Court have the power to construct a definition from scratch or should they merely recognize a preexisting entity and enshrine it in law? And is there any…
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Speaking Assumes Morality
We need people who are trustworthy in the world. This is, in part, because want to know about things that are not immediately verifiable. When we miss the game we want to be able to trust our friends to tell us who won. We pity the gullible person who is prepared to overhaul her entire set of assumptions about the world because her friend tells her that there are people in a far off land who have wings. We don’t enjoy watching her being taken for a ride. Similarly, we feel for the person who trusts no one and lives in permanent relational isolation. If we are lied to we…
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Ethics Pie
There are three schools of thought in contemporary ethics. The first, and most common in the West, is consequentialism. It is the idea that an action is deemed to be right or wrong depending on the outcome of the action. The second, duty ethics (sometimes called “deontological” ethics), deems an action to be intrinsically wrong or right despite the consequences. A third way to look at ethics is to focus less on the action and more on the agent. Virtue ethicists argue that ethics is a matter of character – lies, when repeated, are determined by a liar, a person for whom the truth is repeatedly denied. Instead of the…
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A Great Evil
A recent article in The Journal of Medical Ethics argues the following: “What we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled” You can read the article here or a summary here. A baby, like a fetus, does not yet possess the properties necessary to be regarded as a person, our authors argue; Infanticide is no different from abortion (On this latter point I concur) In 1980 Mary Anne Warren wrote: “Some human beings are not people, and there may well be people who are not human beings.” Warren suggested that fetuses should not be…
- 9/11, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, Gene Veith, Jessica Stern, Jürgen Habermas, Karl Marx, Martin Amis, Moral Equivalence, Speaking of Terror Part 5, Terror
Speaking of Terror – Part V
Much of what was written after 9/11 and in the build up to war in Afghanistan and Iraq was about morality. A common theme posed by the secularist was the problem of moral equivalence. Moral Equivalence is a phrase used in political debate to describe those who deny any moral hierarchy in a conflict,1 it is the “100 percent and 360 degree inability to pass judgment on any ethnicity other than our own.”2For example, when applied to religion, rather than nations, Christians are often perceived to be in the same boat as the Islamist as Veith notes: Christians find themselves in a precarious position. While they believe the kingdom of…