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Properly Basic Moral Belief
According to Alvin Plantinga, religious belief is properly basic because it is involuntary and it arises from a properly functioning natural faculty that, if its origin story is true, grants the belief epistemological warrant. Is there any reason to suppose moral belief, especially at its limits, is any different from a properly basic religious belief? […]
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Recognising Moral Necessity
Do you recognise anything to be morally necessary? I can easily imagine that many of you don’t. Scepticism is easy, and in any case easier than holding yourself to account. It’s easy to overlook or dismiss the morally necessary because most of the time we live in a murky world of moral contingency and epistemic uncertainty. But every now and then we hit upon a clear moral limit. I have sometimes found these limits in my own life; life has shown me what I believe. I imagine some of you have experienced the same. […]
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The Educative Power of Extreme Examples
Philosophers are often found reflecting on extreme examples of moral good or evil. When political philosophers talk about justice, they refer to utopian ideals that have no realistic chance of being realised. When we discuss ‘The Problem of Evil’, we talk about the Holocaust, or Hiroshima, or the worst forms of child abuse. These are extreme examples that hardly any of us face in real life (thankfully). Often they are outright fictional, as is seen when we discuss classic examples from literature and film. To many non-philosophers, this might seem like a waste of time and talent. […]
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Pandering
Recently, I’ve been running a series of posts about the problem of evil. Much of it is recycled from my book on the subject. The main motivation for this is SEO: I want to teach the Google bots that my writing here is what should be read, rather than my old academic writing. Ancient Greek philosophers had a word for this kind of thing: κολακεία. It is variously translated as ‘pandering’ or ‘flattery’. It means playing to the crowd. In my case, it means trying to give the Google bots what they can understand. […]
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Ivan Karamazov is a Hopeless Romantic
Ivan Karamazov, from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, is often paraded across the philosophical literature on the problem of evil, made to stand as an example of a particular kind of argument from evil, one that is concerned not with the quantity or severity of evil in this world but with a certain qualitative type of evil. I think Ivan is often misunderstood. Or rather, Dostoevsky is often misunderstood, in the way that Ivan is put to use in the context of the philosophy of religion. […]
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Evaluative Claims within the Problem of Evil
When it comes to the problem of evil, I’ve always felt there was something wrong with someone trying to argue for a factual conclusion on the basis of moral premises. Saying ‘God does not exist’ sounds an awful lot like a statement of a fact, like a claim that ‘no human being that exists is over 10ft tall’, but the grounds for this fact are at times little more than a report of your moral feelings. Ordinarily, we wouldn’t give this kind of argument the time of day. […]
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The Problem of Evil is Not an Intellectual Problem
In my book on the problem of evil and elsewhere, I present an argument to the conclusion that theism is morally problematic. But it would be a mistake to think that I am pronouncing judgement on the theist. And this is certainly not an argument for atheism. This argument is a result of my reflections on the problem of evil as an ethical problem, not what we could call the ‘intellectual problem’ of weighing up the rationality of theistic belief. […]
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The Failings of Sceptical Theism
It’s very difficult to stop sceptical theism sliding into a more widespread moral scepticism. Ultimately, this would be morally paralysing. If sceptical theism says that ‘for all we know’, what seems bad is in fact for the best, then how are we to ever judge anything as bad? […]
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The Too-Detached Perspective of Theodicy
Theodicy stands accused of adopting a too-detached perspective when theorising about the potential justifications for the evils of the world. As part of the process of constructing a theodicy, we are encouraged to step back from our down-to-earth moral perspective and try to see the big picture. We are encouraged to look at the world as if from a God’s-eye view. How else can we understand God’s reasons for permitting the evils of the world except by trying to see things from His perspective? But there is something morally problematic about adopting this detached perspective […]
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Consequentialism, Instrumentalism, Unrestricted: A Dilemma for Theodicy
A collection of moral anti-theodicy’s accusations revolve around theodicy’s being either covertly or overtly consequentialist or instrumentalist in its moral reasoning. According to theodicy, all evils are capable of being justified on consequentialist grounds. As long as the consequence is worth the cost, and as long as the consequence is realised, then there is no problem. There is a problem here, though, because we would not normally endorse such an unrestricted consequentialism, and it’s particularly unusual for theists to do so. Are there no limits on what can be permitted in order to reach our goal? […]
An experiment with philosophy as a way of life
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