When I was writing my response to Bill in another thread, this thought came to me. Look at the list of people that I offered which I think are moral abominations:
Matt Blunt; W.; Bill Frist; Rick Santorum; Tom DeLay; Bob (?) Cornyn; Gerald Allen; Ralph Reed; Jesse Helms; Orin Hatch; Trent Lott; Bill O’Reilly; Michael Savage; Sean Hannity; Robert Talton; James Dobson; Antonin Scalia; John Ashcroft.
Now, what’s interesting about this list (more…)
Let ‘expressivism’ refer to the view that moral thought and discourse does not try to describe what is the case but rather expresses attitiudes. Let ‘descriptivism’ refer to the view that moral thought and discourse does try to describe what is the case. For simplicity, let’s say that the relevant attitudes are ‘moral approval’ and ‘moral disapproval’ and leave any attempt to distinguish ‘moral’ approval and disapproval from ‘nonmoral’ approval and disapproval for another day. Let’s also put to one side any issues arising from thick moral concepts/predicates.
Many folks in the office seem convinced (more…)
One of the the things that surprised me the most when I came to Graduate school was how many traditional believers there were here. I think that I was under the naive impression that most everyone would be like me: an atheist and unapologetically atheistic at that. I did expect there to be a few ‘weird theists’, i.e., people who could not shake the feeling that there was something out there beyond us that they couldn’t explain but were happy to call it “God” and also happy to admit that the belief was irrational — that I expected. I didn’t expect out in out Christians.
So, my question for the more traditional believers (more…)
This came up in Kant on Monday. Justin found it “asinine”. I think he meant unsound. My guess is that many of you will find it contentious.
1. If one has an experience of God, then one has an experience of a property of God.
2. for each property that God has, God has that property absolutely.
3. If some property is not absolute, then that property is not a property of God. (equivalent to 2, included for clarity.)
4. We cannot experience absolute properties.
Therefore, we cannot have an experience of God.
One seems cut and dry. (more…)
According to the institutional theory of art, much or even all of what makes something an artwork lies outside of the work itself and has more to do with it being embedded within an institution, namely, the artworld. To support this theory, George Dickie and Arthur Danto make this argument:
A common illustration (more…)
All,
I’ve come across this argument in a journal article:
This looks like denying the antecedent, but I’m pretty sure there isn’t anything logically unkosher going on with the author’s overall point. So I’m puzzled. Does the subjunctive aspect of the conditional make a difference here?
Since I’m teaching bioethics, I’ve been thinking about these sorts of questions lately. Plus, I’m from Georgia. The thread below was a request for a defense of the moral wrongness of at least some cases of cloning. That thread hasn’t generated much in the way of a concrete argument for the moral impermissibility of cloning. Here I’m asking for a defense of the moral wrongness of incest. I know that lots of us have the intuition that it’s wrong, but I don’t know of a good argument for this conclusion.
I note a couple of things to initiate the dialectic. (more…)
This post is a new one that stems from an old thread, but I think that has branched off into several topics and I’d like some honest attempts at answers to these particular questions, so here goes:
-What could possibly justify a Christian’s only agreeing to negative rights? For, it seems to me, Jesus would not make such a distinction. (more…)
This post is a continuation of the phenomena/noumena debate from Kant on 4/18. I defended the following two-part claim in class: Kant’s project suggests the following: A) there are two mutually exclusive sets of objects and B) the members of one set are depend for their existence (in part) on the members of the second set. In short, there are phenomenal objects and things-in-themselves, and the former are dependent upon the latter for their existence. I’ll only defend (A) here.
As an argument for (A), I presented (roughly) the following:
(more…)
Consider the following:
You can either play the “Jesus Pills” game, or you can not. If you choose to play, 10 pills, identical in appearance, are placed in front of you, and you must choose one to swallow. 9 of these 10 pills would have the following effect on you: you would be brainwashed into affecting a “Jesus-like” disposition, and begin helping the sick and needy. By the time the pill has worn off (in a week) you will have saved at least 10 lives. (more…)