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The argument from morality is an argument for the existence of God. Arguments from morality tend to be based on moral normativity or moral order. Arguments from moral normativity observe some aspect of morality and argue that God is the best or only explanation for this, concluding that God must exist. Arguments from moral order are based on the asserted need for moral order to exist in the universe. They claim that, for this moral order to exist, God must exist to support it. The argument from morality is noteworthy in that one cannot evaluate the soundness of the argument without attending to almost every important philosophical issue in meta-ethics.
Ethical naturalism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:
- Ethical sentences express propositions.
- Some such propositions are true.
- Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world.
- These moral features of the world are reducible to some set of non-moral features.
Morality is the differentiation of intentions, decisions and actions between those that are distinguished as proper (right) and those that are improper (wrong). Morality can be a body of standards or principles derived from a code of conduct from a particular philosophy, religion or culture, or it can derive from a standard that a person believes should be universal. Morality may also be specifically synonymous with "goodness" or "rightness".
Moral relativism or ethical relativism is used to describe several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different peoples and cultures. An advocate of such ideas is often referred to as a relativist for short.
Moral realism is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world, some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately. This makes moral realism a non-nihilist form of ethical cognitivism with an ontological orientation, standing in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism and moral skepticism, including ethical subjectivism, error theory ; and non-cognitivism. Within moral realism, the two main subdivisions are ethical naturalism and ethical non-naturalism.
John Leslie Mackie was an Australian philosopher. He made significant contributions to ethics, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language.
The term incompatibilism was coined in the 1960s, most likely by philosopher Keith Lehrer, to name the view that the thesis of determinism is logically incompatible with the classical thesis of free will. The term compatibilism was coined to name the view that the classical free will thesis is logically compatible with determinism, i.e. it is possible for an ordinary human to exercise free will even in a universe at which determinism is true. These terms were originally coined for use within a research paradigm that was dominant among academics during the so-called "classical period" from the 1960s to 1980s, or what has been called the "classical analytic paradigm". Within the classical analytic paradigm, the problem of free will and determinism was understood as a Compatibility Question: "Is it possible for an ordinary human to exercise free will when determinism is true?" Those working in the classical analytic paradigm who answered "no" were incompatibilists in the original, classical-analytic sense of the term, now commonly called classical incompatibilists; they proposed that determinism precludes free will because it precludes our ability to do otherwise. Those who answered "yes" were compatibilists in the original sense of the term, now commonly called classical compatibilists. Given that classical free will theorists agreed that it is at least metaphysically possible for an ordinary human to exercise free will, all classical compatibilists accepted a compossibilist account of free will and all classical incompatibilists accepted a libertarian account of free will.
William Lane Craig is an American analytic philosopher, Christian apologist, author, and Wesleyan theologian who upholds the view of Molinism and neo-Apollinarianism. He is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Houston Christian University and a Research Professor of Philosophy at Biola University's Talbot School of Theology. Craig has updated and defended the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God. He has also published work where he argues in favor of the historical plausibility of the resurrection of Jesus. His study of divine aseity and Platonism culminated with his book God Over All.
John Jamieson Carswell Smart was a British-Australian philosopher who was appointed as an Emeritus Professor by the Australian National University. He worked in the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. He wrote several entries for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Moral nihilism is the meta-ethical view that nothing is morally right or morally wrong and that morality doesn't exist.
Moral psychology is a field of study in both philosophy and psychology. Historically, the term "moral psychology" was used relatively narrowly to refer to the study of moral development. Moral psychology eventually came to refer more broadly to various topics at the intersection of ethics, psychology, and philosophy of mind. Some of the main topics of the field are moral judgment, moral reasoning, moral sensitivity, moral responsibility, moral motivation, moral identity, moral action, moral development, moral diversity, moral character, altruism, psychological egoism, moral luck, moral forecasting, moral emotion, affective forecasting, and moral disagreement.
Evolutionary ethics is a field of inquiry that explores how evolutionary theory might bear on our understanding of ethics or morality. The range of issues investigated by evolutionary ethics is quite broad. Supporters of evolutionary ethics have claimed that it has important implications in the fields of descriptive ethics, normative ethics, and metaethics.
Metaepistemology is the branch of epistemology and metaphilosophy that studies the underlying assumptions made in debates in epistemology, including those concerning the existence and authority of epistemic facts and reasons, the nature and aim of epistemology, and the methodology of epistemology.
Elliott R. Sober is Hans Reichenbach Professor and William F. Vilas Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin–Madison. Sober is noted for his work in philosophy of biology and general philosophy of science.
Richard Newell Boyd was an American philosopher, who spent most of his career teaching philosophy at Cornell University where he was Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters Emeritus. He specialized in epistemology, the philosophy of science, language, and mind.
Pragmatic ethics is a theory of normative philosophical ethics and meta-ethics. Ethical pragmatists such as John Dewey believe that some societies have progressed morally in much the way they have attained progress in science. Scientists can pursue inquiry into the truth of a hypothesis and accept the hypothesis, in the sense that they act as though the hypothesis were true; nonetheless, they think that future generations can advance science, and thus future generations can refine or replace their accepted hypotheses. Similarly, ethical pragmatists think that norms, principles, and moral criteria are likely to be improved as a result of inquiry.
Australian philosophy refers to the philosophical tradition of the people of Australia and of its citizens abroad. Academic philosophy has been mostly pursued in universities. It has been broadly in the tradition of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, but has also had representatives of a diverse range of other schools, such as idealism, Catholic neo-scholasticism, Marxism, and continental, feminist and Asian philosophy.
The predation problem or predation argument refers to the consideration of the harms experienced by animals due to predation as a moral problem, that humans may or may not have an obligation to work towards preventing. Discourse on this topic has, by and large, been held within the disciplines of animal and environmental ethics. The issue has particularly been discussed in relation to animal rights and wild animal suffering. Some critics have considered an obligation to prevent predation as untenable or absurd and have used the position as a reductio ad absurdum to reject the concept of animal rights altogether. Others have criticized any obligation implied by the animal rights position as environmentally harmful.
David Enoch is an ethicist and philosopher of law with research interests in moral, political and legal philosophy within the analytic tradition. He is the co-director of the Center for Moral and Political Philosophy and has been the Rodney Blackman Chair in the Philosophy of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 2005. He received his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and Bachelor of Laws degrees from Tel Aviv University in 1993. He then completed his PhD in philosophy at New York University in 2003.
Experimental jurisprudence (X-Jur) is an emerging field of legal scholarship that explores the nature of legal phenomena through psychological investigations of legal concepts. The field departs from traditional analytic legal philosophy in its ambition to elucidate common intuitions in a systematic fashion employing the methods of social science. Equally, unlike research in legal psychology, X-Jur emphasises the philosophical implications of its findings, such as whether, how, and in what respects the law's content is a matter of moral perspective. Whereas some legal theorists have welcomed X-Jur's emergence, others have expressed reservations about the contributions it seeks to make.
References
- ↑ Kahane, Guy (March 2011). "Evolutionary Debunking Arguments". Noûs . 45 (1): 103–125. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0068.2010.00770.x. PMC 3175808 . PMID 21949447.
- 1 2 Wielenberg, Erik J. (April 2010). "On the Evolutionary Debunking of Morality". Ethics . 120 (3): 441–464. doi:10.1086/652292. ISSN 0014-1704. S2CID 144853113.
- 1 2 FitzPatrick, William J. (April 2015). "Debunking evolutionary debunking of ethical realism". Philosophical Studies . 172 (4): 883–904. doi:10.1007/s11098-014-0295-y. ISSN 0031-8116. S2CID 170086133.
- ↑ Jong, Jonathan; Visala, Aku (December 2014). "Evolutionary debunking arguments against theism, reconsidered". International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. 76 (3): 243–258. doi:10.1007/s11153-014-9461-6. ISSN 0020-7047. S2CID 170394509.
- ↑ Vavova, Katia (February 2015). "Evolutionary Debunking of Moral Realism: Evolutionary Debunking of Moral Realism". Philosophy Compass . 10 (2): 104–116. doi:10.1111/phc3.12194.
- ↑ Vavova, Katia (2006). "Debunking Evolutionary Debunking". Oxford Studies in Metaethics. Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0-19-870930-5.
