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We all have an interest in human progress. Whether it be the accumulation of knowledge, removal of disease, increase in prosperity, decline in murder, or a wealth of other worthy aims, we want to see human life get better over time. However, for some people, being 'part of history' or devoting oneself to human advancement is the source of their meaning in life. It is the 'something' that transcends their own value and grants them purpose for their lives. Without it, they think their life would be pointless. The view that human progress can provide meaning in life goes back at least as far as Hegel. Hegel’s view is complicated. But one can grasp the idea by thinking about the nature of change. Hegel thought that change was due to conflict. First, a conflict emerges between two ideas or forces. Then, the conflict works its way out. Once the conflict resolves, another situation is created in which new conflicts are present. The process of change is a 'dialectical...

Those opposed to the pro-life movement think that their opponents have a nefarious motive for their activism: "they don't really care about babies. They just want power or control, or they just want to win." In the following debate, the Hitch makes this explicit. Watch Bill Craig's response. Starts at 1:16: Craig's response is right. The Hitch presumes that Christians don't have the intellectual resources to care for people in the present. All they have is a hope that the future, post-resurrection world will be better. All the Christian talk about life is really a veiled attempt to control others. Craig's response is the denial of this premise. He argues that we do indeed have the intellectual resources to care about people in the present. It is because people are made in the image of God that each person has intrinsic moral worth and comes with a set of inalienable rights. In other words, Christians have good reason to care for people in the present...

You do something great, I clap. The child is naughty, he gets no ice cream. The athlete wins the race, she gets a medal. All of these actions and reactions seem built into the universe. It's just the way it is. According to Clifton Mark, this is false - this is not the way the world works. Oh, and to believe it is leads to evil. Mark defines meritocracy as the idea that "the rewards of life – money, power, jobs, university admission – should be distributed according to skill and effort." Most people, he says, think of meritocracy as a fact about the world. It is just the way the world works. However, Mark argues that "the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false." Mark offers one argument for his claim that meritocracy is not the way the world works and three more to support the claim that it leads to all sorts of evil. Of course, it could be the case that it is the way the world works and that ...

“we had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and national community” (Martin Luther King) Is it okay for a Christian to break the law? On the one hand, the Bible tells us to to obey governing authorities (1 Peter 2; Romans 13). On the other hand, there are examples of apparent justified law-breaking (Esther 4; Daniel 1, 3, 6; Acts 5:29). Occasionally, Christians are obliged to break the law. When the law asks us to perform acts contrary to the explicit command of God, we are obliged to obey God. For example, Christians are obliged to disobey any prescription to refrain from worship of God. We are also obligated to explain the gospel to people (sometimes this gets us arrested ). According to Martin Luther King, Christians ought to disobey unjust laws such as segregation laws: “There are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obey...

If you were to find yourself in court accused of performing an action that you think is morally permissible--good, even--but against which there is a law, how would you react? Most likely, even if everyone in the room thought otherwise, you would think an injustice was being carried out. Imagine being led from the courtroom to undergo lashing, imprisonment, or even death when in your mind you had done nothing wrong. I'm sure most people's stomachs would be in a knot. You'd be angry and incensed for good reason. The reason, I suggest, is that legal codes of particular governing authorities are beholden to a higher law. Now, perhaps you are wrong. Either there is no higher law or you are wrong about what it would say. If there is no higher law, then that feeling of injustice is merely a feeling and nothing more. In which case, justice just is whatever the court decides. If, on the other hand, there is a higher law, but you are wrong about what it would say, then you ha...

What is the point of citing Bible verses when making moral arguments? Since not everyone believes the Bible to be true or authoritative, surely we need to make arguments based on something else, something we have in common. But Christians use the Bible all the time. Why? To get to an answer, one has to consider a range of issues in ethics. Once one has reasoned through these questions, it becomes clear why many Christians find that the Bible has an essential role to play in most moral reasoning. Thus, when engaging in moral debate, we often use the Bible. The first relevant issue is whether moral statements are translatable into factual statements. For example, can one translate "it is wrong to murder" into a factual statement? Some suggest that this is not possible, that concepts such as 'good' and 'wrong' are not analyzable in terms of anything else. Christians, however, are likely to say that "it is wrong to murder" can be translated into th...

Cultural Relativism is the view that “Normality…is culturally defined” (Ruth Benedict). More precisely, cultural relativists hold to MR: (MR) There is no moral principle which necessarily applies to everyone, everywhere, and at every time For the cultural relativist, the source of moral principles is the conventions given by a group of people who make up a culture. The argument for such a view is: (1) What is normative is culturally determined (2) What is moral is normative (3) Therefore, what is moral is culturally defined Why might one hold to such a view? First, one might think the following is true: "Beliefs about what is right and wrong vary from culture to culture." Since we have no way to tell which culture is correct (ours or theirs), the following is also true: "What is really right and wrong varies from culture to culture." Second, one might think that if someone says that morals are not relative, then they must be intolerant, ethnocentric or ...

Though it is generally true that those who work hard will earn a living, the sweat of your brow has no necessary connection with the contents of your wallet. The value of your labor does not determine its price . What determines the price of something is the amount someone is willing to pay for it. Nor is there are moral connection - without a voluntary  agreement to pay for someone's labor, work itself does not obligate anyone to pay for it.

Natural human language-use entails moral obligations, specifically objective obligations between persons. All of these obligations are routinely broken (see Twitter). These obligations are both objective and social. They depend on being objective and not merely an expression of a particular preference or culture. They also depend on the existence of a social context composed of more than one person.  As Nicholas Wolterstorff claims, “speaking is, through and through, a normative engagement.” Wolterstorff suggests three norms and provides examples: (i) speech should be related rightly to the mental state of the speaker. If the speaker asserts something he ought to believe it. If the speaker promises something, he ought to intend to fulfill the promise. If the speaker requests something, he ought to want it. (ii) speech should be rightly related to the facts. A speaker ought not to assert what is false or proclaim someone guilty who is innocent. (iii) speech should ...

Dissatisfaction is a mental state induced by not getting what one wants. Desire is also a root of evil. As James puts it, "each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own  desire . Then  desire  when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death" (James 1:14-15). There are at least two proposals on the cultural table for dealing with desires. Neither way works. The first way is to attempt to remove desires from the inside. This is the way of 'enlightenment' - coming to believe a new truth - there are no such things as desires. They appear real, but they are not. Desires are native to persons. We have them and there's no way to rid ourselves of them. Thus, some teach that there are really no persons. If there are no persons, then there is nothing to have a desire. To realize such a truth is to be enlightened. According to the second way, though we cannot remove desire from the inside, we can severely ...

This is my final post this week in honor of those who march today. I am a person. So are you. A person is the kind of thing that one ought not kill without a good reason. If the little being inside the womb is also a person, then it ought to be protected as much as is possible. If so, then the state should secure this protection by granting legal rights to the little being in the womb. According to the Christian, something is a person if it is made in the image of God. Furthermore, only persons are made in the image of God. Although God created cows, mountains, vegetables, and clouds, none of them are made in his image. God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Gen 1:27) God is a person. He is aware of himself. He can make choices, think, and act in accordance. He is the paradigm of personhood. Being made in his image is to at least be like God in those ways without being the same as God. Thus, if something is made i...

[This week, my blog is dedicated to those out marching for the lives of the most vulnerable ] Imagine you are placed into a time travel capsule and sent 100 years into the future. Before you are jetted off, you are allowed to make some changes to the activities of human beings in the present that may make your life better or more tolerable 100 years from now. You have been studying climate science and it seems to you that there is a 50% probability that some of our activities in the present will have bad consequences 100 years from now. So, you make some changes to human activities that will perhaps mitigate the harmful effects of those activities. Then you are sent into the future. If what I have said sounds reasonable it is because there are people who are going to live in 100 years time and, if predictions turn out correctly, they will wish people living 100 years ago would have made changes to their lives in order to mitigate the effects of those activities on those living in ...

I am glad that I exist. I hope you are too. To be glad about one's existence is to prefer it to be the case that one exits rather than one does not. If I am glad that I exist, then I don't want the history of the world up until my existence to be significantly altered. This is because my existence is contingent upon an incredibly complex history leading to the joining of a particular sperm with a particular egg. Any other pairing would have produced someone else and thus I would not exist. If I am glad that I exist now, then I don't want the history of the world after I began to exist to include any event that would entail that I do not exist now. If so, then I ought to think abortion is not morally permissible.  If I am glad that I exist now, then I also don't want the history of the world after I began to exist to include any event that would entail that I do not exist now. One significant alteration to the past would be my mother having an abortion when I was i...

In honor of all those marching in the cold , this week my blog is devoted to polemical refutation of pro-abortion arguments. Jennifer Wright argues that pro-lifers ignore facts . Six of them. Well I don't want to ignore facts. So, what are they? Are they true? Are they relevant to the moral status of abortion? First fact: fetuses are distinguishable from babies:  They can pretend fetuses are indistinguishable from babies, despite the fact that medical evidence tells us fetuses cannot live unsupported , even with a respirator before 21 weeks.  In other words, a fetus is a baby only if it can live unsupported. But if this was a condition for babyhood, it would be morally permissible to kill many babies who are already born. Many babies are born premature or with health conditions and are supported by things like respirators. We wouldn't say it is morally justifiable to kill them. Thus, just because a fetus requires the support of the mother to live, it does not...

According to Jean Kazez, it is implausible that life begins at conception. She suggests that an entity with life-status must be an entity that has continuity and can be individuated. To have continuity an entity must have identity conditions at t1 and t2. To be individuated an entity must have some set of conditions that set it apart from another entity. Kazez argues that the entity in the womb has neither until it is 14 days old. Thus, life cannot begin at conception. Her argument is as follows: (1) If it is a life, then it is a unified, continuous individual. (2) An embryo is not a unified, continuous individual. (3) Therefore, an embryo is not a life. Kazez assumes the truth of (1) and provides a couple of reasons to accept (2). First, in the first few days of development the conceptus can split and develop into two or more individuals. At best, the collection of cells that compose the entity at this stage are like a "flock of birds" - there may be some form of lif...

Louis Pojman makes a convincing case for the conclusion that if there is any case for the equal dignity of human beings, then God exists: “The doctrine that all people are of equal worth, and this endowed with inalienable rights, is rooted in our religious heritage…The originators of rights language presupposed a theistic world view, and secular advocates of equal rights are, to cite Tolstoy, like children who see beautiful flowers, grab them, break them at their stems, and try to transplant them without their roots. The egalitarian assertions of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights are similar to those of our Declaration of Independence, with one important difference—God is left out of the former; but that makes all the difference. That posit…is not just an ugly appendage or a pious afterthought but a root necessary for the bloom of rights.” (295). His argument begins with two contrasting assumptions, the empirical counter-evidence to egalitarianism (C...

The Maverick explains : It is often said that a human fetus is a potential human life. Not so! A human fetus is an actual human life. Consider a third-trimester human fetus, alive and well, developing in the normal way in the mother. It is potentially many things: a neonate, a two-year-old, a speaker of some language, an adolescent, an adult, a corpse. And let's be clear that a potential X is not an X. A potential oak tree is not an oak tree. A potential neonate is not a neonate. A potential speaker of Turkish is not a Turkish speaker. But an acorn, though only potentially an oak tree, is an actual acorn, not a potential acorn. And its potentialities are actually possessed by it, not potentially possessed by it. The typical human fetus is an actual, living, human biological individual that actually possesses various potentialities. So if you accept that there is a general, albeit not exceptionless, prohibition against the taking of innocent human life, then you nee...

Victor Reppert's reconstruction of the Roe v. Wade argument is illuminating: There is a constitutionally guaranteed right of privacy, of which we can be certain. In the case of abortion, the right of privacy must prevail unless there is a countervailing right of which we can be certain, such as the fetus's right to life. This protects a woman's right to consult with her doctor and decide whether or not to get an abortion. Just as it is a violation of privacy rights to make birth control illegal, it violates privacy right to prohibit abortion, unless a countervailing right can be established. But the fetus's right to life cannot be established. Reasonable persons can disagree as to whether fetuses have a right to life or not. One may, based on one's religion perhaps, believe that they have this right, but this right cannot be demonstrated in the same way that the right of privacy can be demonstrated. Therefore there is a Constitutional right to abortion. Re...