God and Moral Obligation

God and Moral Obligation
Author: C. Stephen Evans
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2013-02-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199696683

C. 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.

Understanding Moral Obligation

Understanding Moral Obligation
Author: Robert Stern
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2011-12-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1139505017

In 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.

God and Moral Law

God and Moral Law
Author: Mark C. Murphy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2011-11-17
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0199693668

Does 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.

Morality Without God?

Morality Without God?
Author: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2009-07-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0195337638

A 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).

God's Own Ethics

God's Own Ethics
Author: Mark C. Murphy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2017
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198796919

Every 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.

God and Cosmos

God and Cosmos
Author: David Baggett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2016
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199931216

God 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.

The Second-Person Standpoint

The Second-Person Standpoint
Author: Stephen Darwall
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2009-09-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0674034627

Why 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.

Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love

Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love
Author: C. Stephen Evans
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2004-09-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199272174

A compelling account of Kierkegaard's ethical views, seeing him against the backdrop of nineteenth-century European society but showing the relevance of his thought for the twenty-first century. Kierkegaard's view of morality as grounded in God's command to love our neighbours as ourselves has clear advantages over contemporary secular rivals.

God's Command

God's Command
Author: John E. Hare
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 495
Release: 2015-10-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191063495

This work focuses on divine command, and in particular the theory that what makes something obligatory is that God commands it, and what makes something wrong is that God commands us not to do it. Focusing on the Abrahamic faiths, eminent scholar John E. Hare explains that two experiences have had to be integrated. The first is that God tells us to do something, or not to do something. The second is that we have to work out ourselves what to do and what not to do. The difficulty has come in establishing the proper relation between them. In Christian reflection on this, two main traditions have emerged, divine command theory and natural law theory. Hare successfully defends a version of divine command theory, but also shows that there is considerable overlap with some versions of natural law theory. He engages with a number of Christian theologians, particularly Karl Barth, and extends into a discussion of divine command within Judaism and Islam. The work concludes by examining recent work in evolutionary psychology, and argues that thinking of our moral obligations as produced by divine command offers us some help in seeing how a moral conscience could develop in a way that is evolutionarily stable.

Reasonable Faith

Reasonable Faith
Author: William Lane Craig
Publisher: Crossway
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2008
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1433501155

This 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.