Post tagged with morality

  • How many ‘F’ words in a film is TOO many?

    August 09th, 201103:04 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
     It has been nineteen years since conservative commentator and film critic Michael Medved published the bestseller Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values (HarperCollins, 1992), a book that made him a hero for "family values" conservatives across North America. While Medved made some valid points about the...

  • Can atheists be trusted?

    May 07th, 201110:27 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Last week Stephen Maitzen, a very fine philosopher of religion, provided the links for two of his papers. The popular distillation of the argument is "Does God Destroy our Duty of Compassion?" (Free Inquiry, (Oct/Nov 2010), 52-53). That is the place if you want a quick overview of the argument. The second paper, ostentatiously titled "Ordinary Mora...

  • Why we should all be driving a Tata (if we’re lucky)

    March 09th, 201109:17 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    A few years ago I was jogging along when I came upon a fine fog hovering over the sidewalk. The idiot neighbor was busy spraying his lawn with some kind of carcinogenic chemical to make it green. Good for him. But my lungs bore the brunt of it. Economists refer to that as an externality. An externality is any cost to a behavior or activity or mode ...

  • Can there be morality without God?

    November 13th, 200909:01 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    While walking among the book tables at the American Academy of Religion conference in Montreal this year I came across Walter Sinnott-Armstrong's new book Morality Without God? (Oxford University Press, 2009). Sinnott-Armstrong is an atheist at Dartmouth College, a respected scholar (as employment at an ivy-league school surely implies!) and a vete...

  • The games people play with morality

    October 21st, 200902:48 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Over the last few posts I have been arguing that morality is objective and that naturalistic (i.e. non-supernaturalist) views of the world are unable to ground morality as objective. Thus, insofar as we agree that we do in fact know certain moral facts as objective, absolute facts (e.g. it is a fact that it is wrong to torture infants for fun as su...

  • Alien genocide and other moral horrors

    October 18th, 200909:01 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    The Nazi alien thought experiment showcased in "Rapist insects and Nazi Aliens from Planet X-1951" was intended to demonstrate the implausibilty with species-relative analyses of morality. I am happy to report that the last fifty hours have seen a number of interesting comments by way of response, but nothing that hinders the ar...

  • Rapist insects and Nazi Aliens from Planet X-1951

    October 16th, 200905:33 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    I fear that I cannot engage everything in the last post, so I'm saying a few words here about Sorceror's fine comments which were, I believe, next in the queue. As with most of the skeptical atheist types responding here, Sorceror is not happy with the notion that rape, cannibalism, torture, and the like are objective moral horrors. Sorceror believ...

  • The Moral of the Story: On the Relativity of Strangeness (Part 2)

    October 15th, 200911:25 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Ahh the relativity of strangeness. That which doesn't fit with one's presuppositions is suddenly suspect, brazenly bizarre. So it seems to be is the reaction when some atheists countenance the existence of a moral law that exists objectively regardless of the existence of any and all finite creatures. AnAtheist.net's comments on my post "If there ...

  • If there is no God then is everything permissible?

    October 12th, 200911:33 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    The moral argument for God's existence finds one of its most historically influential treatments in Dostoyevsky's magisterial The Brothers Karamazov. Consider the following passage where Smerdyakov replies to Ivan (the atheist): I first thought that if I had some money I could start all over again, either in Moscow or, better still, abroad; I...

  • Slippery slopes are not the point

    July 28th, 200911:15 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    I actually have a day job but I cannot resist a quick response here. A few readers think that I am offering a slippery slope argument (as I interpret them anyway). In other words, if we take the view that morality is subjective, then anything goes. So gaga writes: "I see that you keep putting up the same view that since there is no ultimate objecti...
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An exploration of faith, knowledge, reason and doubt (with the occasional trite pop culture reference thrown in for good measure).