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Author: C. Stephen Evans
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-02-28
Total Pages: 210
ISBN-13: 0199696683
DOWNLOAD EBOOKC. Stephen Evans defends the claim that moral obligations are best understood as divine commands or requirements; hence an important part of morality depends on God. God's requirements are communicated in a variety of ways, including conscience, and that natural law ethics and virtue ethics provide complementary perspectives to this view.
Author: Robert Stern
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-12-15
Total Pages: 293
ISBN-13: 1139505017
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn many histories of modern ethics, Kant is supposed to have ushered in an anti-realist or constructivist turn by holding that unless we ourselves 'author' or lay down moral norms and values for ourselves, our autonomy as agents will be threatened. In this book, Robert Stern challenges the cogency of this 'argument from autonomy', and claims that Kant never subscribed to it. Rather, it is not value realism but the apparent obligatoriness of morality that really poses a challenge to our autonomy: how can this be accounted for without taking away our freedom? The debate the book focuses on therefore concerns whether this obligatoriness should be located in ourselves (Kant), in others (Hegel) or in God (Kierkegaard). Stern traces the historical dialectic that drove the development of these respective theories, and clearly and sympathetically considers their merits and disadvantages; he concludes by arguing that the choice between them remains open.
Author: Mark C. Murphy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-11-17
Total Pages: 204
ISBN-13: 0199693668
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDoes God's existence make a difference to how we explain morality? Mark C. Murphy critiques the two dominant theistic accounts of morality—natural law theory and divine command theory—and presents a novel third view. He argues that we can value natural facts about humans and their good, while keeping God at the centre of our moral explanations. The characteristic methodology of theistic ethics is to proceed by asking whether there are features of moral norms that can be adequately explained only if we hold that such norms have some sort of theistic foundation. But this methodology, fruitful as it has been, is one-sided. God and Moral Law proceeds not from the side of the moral norms, so to speak, but from the God side of things: what sort of explanatory relationship should we expect between God and moral norms given the existence of the God of orthodox theism? Mark C. Murphy asks whether the conception of God in orthodox theism as an absolutely perfect being militates in favour of a particular view of the explanation of morality by appeal to theistic facts. He puts this methodology to work and shows that, surprisingly, natural law theory and divine command theory fail to offer the sort of explanation of morality that we would expect given the existence of the God of orthodox theism. Drawing on the discussion of a structurally similar problem—that of the relationship between God and the laws of nature—Murphy articulates his new account of the relationship between God and morality, one in which facts about God and facts about nature cooperate in the explanation of moral law.
Author: John E. Hare
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2009-08-17
Total Pages: 317
ISBN-13: 1405195983
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGod and Morality evaluates the ethical theories of four principle philosophers, Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Kant, and R.M. Hare. Uses their thinking as the basis for telling the story of the history and development of ethical thought more broadly Focuses specifically on their writings on virtue, will, duty, and consequence Concentrates on the theistic beliefs to highlight continuity of philosophical thought
Author: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Publisher: OUP USA
Published: 2009-07-02
Total Pages: 193
ISBN-13: 0195337638
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA common refrain against atheism and secular humanism is that without belief in God, "everything is permitted." Walter Sinnott-Armstrong dismantles this argument and argues instead that God is not only not essential to morality, but that our moral behavior should be seen as utterly independent of religion. This short, accessible book is on a major aspect of the arguments against atheism and will interest those intrigued by the "new atheism" (Harris, Dawkins, etc).
Author: Mark C. Murphy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017
Total Pages: 221
ISBN-13: 0198796919
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEvery version of the argument from evil requires a premise concerning God's motivation - about the actions that God is motivated to perform or the states of affairs that God is motivated to bring about. The typical source of this premise is a conviction that God is, obviously, morally perfect, where God's moral perfection consists in God's being motivated to act in accordance with the norms of morality by which both we and God are governed. The aim of God's Own Ethics is to challenge this understanding by giving arguments against this view of God as morally perfect and by offering an alternative account of what God's own ethics is like. According to this alternative account, God is in no way required to promote the well-being of sentient creatures, though God may rationally do so. Any norms of conduct that favor the promotion of creaturely well-being that govern God's conduct are norms that are contingently self-imposed by God. This revised understanding of divine ethics should lead us to revise sharply downward our assessment of the force of the argument from evil while leaving intact our conception of God as an absolutely perfect being, supremely worthy of worship.
Author: David Baggett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 345
ISBN-13: 0199931216
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGod and Cosmos provides a four-fold moral argument for God's existence that is cumulative, abductive, and teleological. The four relevant moral realities that theism and Christianity best explain are: intrinsic human value and moral duties; moral knowledge; radical moral transformation of human persons; and a rapprochement between morality and rationality.
Author: C. Stephen Evans
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2013-03-01
Total Pages: 210
ISBN-13: 0191648736
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIs there a connection between religion and morality? Ivan Karamazov, in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, famously declares that if God does not exist, then "everything is permitted." Most philosophers reject such a view and hold that moral truths do not depend on God. C.Stephen Evans argues that the truth lies somewhere between these two claims. It is not quite right to say that there would be nothing left of morality if God did not exist, but moral obligations do depend on God ontologically. Such obligations are best understood as God's commands or requirements, communicated to humans in a variety of ways, including conscience. In God and Moral Obligation, Evans also argues that two views often thought to be rivals to a divine command morality, natural law ethics and virtue ethics, are not rivals at all but provide necessary complementary elements of a comprehensive morality. A number of objections to a divine command account of moral obligations are posed and answered. In the concluding chapters Evans points out the advantages such an account has over secular rivals. The authority and objectivity of moral obligations are best explained by seeing them as divine commands.
Author: Stephen Darwall
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2009-09-30
Total Pages: 363
ISBN-13: 0674034627
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhy should we avoid doing moral wrong? The inability of philosophy to answer this question in a compelling manner—along with the moral skepticism and ethical confusion that ensue—result, Stephen Darwall argues, from our failure to appreciate the essentially interpersonal character of moral obligation. After showing how attempts to vindicate morality have tended to change the subject—falling back on non-moral values or practical, first-person considerations—Darwall elaborates the interpersonal nature of moral obligations: their inherent link to our responsibilities to one another as members of the moral community. As Darwall defines it, the concept of moral obligation has an irreducibly second-person aspect; it presupposes our authority to make claims and demands on one another. And so too do many other central notions, including those of rights, the dignity of and respect for persons, and the very concept of person itself. The result is nothing less than a fundamental reorientation of moral theory that enables it at last to account for morality’s supreme authority—an account that Darwall carries from the realm of theory to the practical world of second-person attitudes, emotions, and actions.
Author: William Lane Craig
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 418
ISBN-13: 1433501155
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis updated edition by one of the world's leading apologists presents a systematic, positive case for Christianity that reflects the latest work in the contemporary hard sciences and humanities. Brilliant and accessible.
