Disambiguating Faith: Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”)

A couple of weeks ago, I argued that there was a real distinction between “lacking a belief in any God or gods” on the one hand and “believing there is no God (or gods)” on the other hand.  Primarily I saw the heart of the distinction as resting with the difference between on the one […]

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Some Suspicions About The Superiority Of Liberal Moral Values

Earlier today, I drew attention to Greta Christina’s article formulating some ideas she picked up from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.  If you have already read either or both of those posts, you can just skip the next two paragraphs meant to catch up new readers. The Goldstein/Greta Christina argument built off of Jonathan Haidt’s theory of […]

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Are Liberal Values Objectively Better Than Conservative Ones?

In recent years, Jonathan Haidt has been influentially arguing that there are five essential modules in the mind from which human moral concerns originate.  He has made this claim in several places, most prominently among philosophers in his contribution to Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (from Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s groundbreaking […]

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Are Divine Command Theory And Objective Morality Mutually Exclusive Concepts?

Luke Muelhauser confronts William Lane Craig with the inconsistency between his divine command interpretation of morality, according to which things are moral or immoral as solely determined by God’s calling them as such, on the one hand, and his insistence that in this way God is the source of “objective morality”: But let us say […]

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Moral Actions, Moral Sentiments, Moral Motives, and Moral Justifications: More On The Nun Excommunicated For Approving A Life-Saving Abortion

In reply to my post on the story of Sister Margaret McBride whom the Catholic Church “automatically excommunicated” for helping to give the go-ahead to an abortion claimed necessary for saving the life of an 11 week pregnant mother, I have already received two interesting replies.  The first challenged the medical argument for the necessity of […]

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A Brief Overview Of My Dissertation

Nietzsche’s writings on morality are famously provocative and controversial.  His criticisms of morality in both theory and practice are so extensive and rhetorically scathing that many philosophers assume that he can offer little or nothing constructive to moral philosophy.  Additionally, his glorification of the will to power sounds prima facie like a celebration of excessively […]

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‘Nuff Said Award Winner: An Andrew Sullivan Reader On A Darwinist Response To Evil

Just great stuff (from a very long e-mail you should read in full): You want a secular account of evil?  Here it is.  Evil does exist, like most other phenomena granted a label by human culture.  It is what we’ve semantically converged on:  a universally-understood though fuzzily-bounded descriptor of that which goes against our current […]

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Philosophical Ethics: Kant, The Good Will, And Rational Actions

In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices […]

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Philosophical Ethics: Does Calling Someone Evil Explain Anything About Them?

In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices […]

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Philosophical Ethics: J.L. Mackie’s Error Theory And Jonathan Harrison’s Critique Thereof

In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices […]

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“It’s A Fact. And There’s No Morality In A Fact.”

via PZ Myers: Your Thoughts?

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Camels With Hammers Philosophy

After this introductory paragraph, every sentence in this post will summarize and link a different post expressing my views, primarily on topics related to atheism, philosophy, and ethics—which are the primary preoccupations of this blog. I am organizing all of these links into this one summary statement of “Camels With Hammers’ Philosophy.”  This post will […]

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The Integral Role Of Emotions In Good Decision Making

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on the indispensable connection between emotions and value assessment and how these are necessary for decision making. The full video is here. Your Thoughts?

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Philosophical Ethics: Bruce Russell On Theories About What Makes An Action Rational Or Not

In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices […]

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Philosophical Ethics: R.M. Hare On Moral Consistency As A Form Of Logical Consistency

In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices […]

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Philosophical Ethics: A.J. Ayer And The Emotivism Of A Positivist

In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester.  Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices […]

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Philosophical Ethics: From G.E. Moore’s Non-Naturalism To C.L. Stevenson’s Emotivism

In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester.  Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices […]

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Philosophical Ethics: On G.E. Moore’s Notion Of Good As An Indefinable Non-Natural Property

In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester.  Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices […]

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Walter Sinnott-Armstrong On Morality Without God

From Philosophy Bites, comes Walter Sinnott-Armstrong on Morality Without God. Sinnott-Armstrong is the editor of the spectacular series of volumes on moral psychology featuring essays featuring both philosophers and psychologists in interaction with each other.  Now he has a new book out, Morality Without God. (via Atheist Media Blog) Your Thoughts?

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Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Subjectivity Which Claims Objectivity

In a previous post, I wrote the following of Rod Dreher’s decision to inculcate in his children a faithfulness that would safeguard their faith against intellectual faltering: I can say that it is utterly depressing you could be so self aware about inculcating your children to believe regardless of truth or falsity, to put faithfulness […]

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A Trove Of Experimental Philosophy Papers

For those unfamiliar with the growing “experimental philosophy” movement, there are some philosophers in tandem with psychologists doing interesting work that has tried to study questions posed by contemporary moral philosophers by employing experimental means.  They are trying to uncover what our moral intuitions really are like and how they actually function. Of course moral […]

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Dispelling The Myth That Nazism Was An Outgrowth Of Darwinian Atheism

In April of last year, Richard Dawkins wrote this letter (which should be read in full) to someone duped by the slander that Darwinian atheism led to Hitler’s ideals and goals: His horrible bidding was done by millions of ordinary German footsoldiers, and the great majority of them were Christians. Many were Lutheran, and many […]

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Are Sex and Morality Merely “Evolutionary Tricks”?

Francis Collins trots out a familiar old argument against atheism.  The argument is that if there is no God then our morality is an illusion.  Collins’s presentation of this argument features an unusual and suspicious spin.  Collins knows that arguments can be made from evolutionary psychology that broadly moral thinking seems to have evolved in […]

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For God or Morality? On Those Who’d Hold Morality Hostage For Faith

In his recent critique of Francis Collins, the Christian Evangelical and geneticist recently appointed by Obama to head the National Institutes of Health, Sam Harris referenced the slides from one of Collins’s speeches.  I want to take two posts (but possibly more if there are comments or if I otherwise have extra relevant ideas on […]

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An Argument For Gay Marriage And Against Traditionalism

I am puzzled by appeals to history to oppose gay marriage because history is only the story of what people have done and never of itself directly tells us anything about right or wrong.  Results of history can serve as warnings about effective and uneffective approaches to goal x or goal y but what people […]

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