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Believed by the Wise: Socrates, Pragmatic Arguments, and Pascal’s Wager
I’ve been wrestling with an aphorism that I can’t pin down. I want to say this: ‘The wise believe what is good and true, the clever only what is proven.’ But I can’t. The tone may be right, but the content is wrong: or rather, not wrong but factually inaccurate.
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Reply to Echazú
The International Journal for Philosophy of Religion published an article recently: ‘Does moral anti-theodicy beg the question?’ In this article, the author, Gabriel Echazú, identifies some important points and potential confusions in the debate about moral anti-theodicy. And since I am the source of some of these confusions, I thought I’d better reply.
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Relative Moral Certainty
Many judgements about the morally impossible will remain epistemically ambiguous and subject to change over time. Many philosophers who do not share my metaethical perspective will think this is a problem for any claims about moral necessity. But I think the issue of epistemic ambiguity actually reinforces my point, rather than weakening it, because this epistemic ambiguity is always relative to something more certain. […]
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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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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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