A Great Plains land ethic is shaped by an intimate knowledge of and appreciation for the evolution, ecology, and aesthetics of the plains landscape. The landscape evokes a sense of wonder and mystery suggested by the word "sacrament." The biblical concept of "covenant" points to God as a community-forming power, a creative process that has evolved into the earth community to which we humans belong. In contrast to an anthropocentric ethic which emphasizes human dominion over nature, a Theo-centric land ethic (...) seeks a balance, reflected in Genesis 1–3, between humans who are members of the earth community and moral agents accountable to God for the earth. A land ethic identifies concrete practices of metanoia and healing: agricultural practices to address the loss and degradation of soil; conservation and protection of water sources; utilization of wind and solar energy; and prescribed burning to restore processes vital to the prairie ecosystem. The concept of subsidiarity suggests that practices of metanoia and healing are a combination of wise public policy balanced by personal, family, church, business, and community responsibility. (shrink)

A Great Plains land ethic is shaped by an intimate knowledge of and appreciation for the evolution, ecology, and aesthetics of the plains landscape. The landscape evokes a sense of wonder and mystery suggested by the word “sacrament.” The biblical concept of “covenant” points to God as a community‐forming power, a creative process that has evolved into the earth community to which we humans belong. In contrast to an anthropocentric ethic which emphasizes human dominion over nature, a Theo‐centric land ethic (...) seeks a balance, reflected in Genesis 1–3, between humans who are membersofthe earth community and moral agents accountable to Godforthe earth. A land ethic identifies concrete practices ofmetanoiaand healing: agricultural practices to address the loss and degradation of soil; conservation and protection of water sources; utilization of wind and solar energy; and prescribed burning to restore processes vital to the prairie ecosystem. The concept of subsidiarity suggests that practices ofmetanoiaand healing are a combination of wise public policy balanced by personal, family, church, business, and community responsibility. (shrink)

The Doomsday Argument says we should increase our subjective probability that Doomsday will occur once we take into account how many humans have lived before us. One objection to this conclusion is that we should accept the Self-Indication Assumption (SIA): Given the fact that you exist, you should (other things equal) favor hypotheses according to which many observers exist over hypotheses on which few observers exist. Nick Bostrom argues that we should not accept the SIA, because it can be used (...) without knowledge of birth rank. Bradley Monton tries to construct a Doomsday Argument without knowledge of birth rank. I argue that Monton fails. The argument he constructs has implicit knowledge of birth rank and it is this knowledge that does the work. Furthermore, I argue that provided we dont have certain specific information about the future, the Doomsday Argument requires knowledge of birth rank. (shrink)

I argue that there is a flaw in the way that response-dependence has been formulated in the literature, and this flawed formulation has been correctly attacked by Mark Johnston’s Missing Explanation Argument (1993, 1998). Moving to a better formulation, which is analogous to the move from behaviourism to functionalism, avoids the Missing Explanation Argument.

Given the prevalence of social media, a nascent but important area of research is the effect of social media posting on one’s own self. It is possible that an individual’s social media posts may have predictive capacity, especially in relation to health behavior. Researchers have long used concepts from the theory of reasoned action to predict health behaviors. The theory does not account for social media, which may influence or predict health behaviors. The purpose of this study was to test (...) a model including Facebook alcohol displays and constructs from the theory of reasoned action to predict binge drinking. Incoming college freshmen from two schools (312 participants between 18 and 19 years old) were interviewed prior to (T1) and 1 year into college (T2), and their Facebook profiles were evaluated for displayed alcohol content. Path modeling was used to evaluate direct and indirect paths predicting binge drinking. Path analysis suggested that Facebook alcohol displays at T1 directly predict binge drinking at T2, while alcohol attitude both directly and indirectly predicts binge drinking. Based on these results, a preliminary model of social media presentation and action is discussed. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

First: there is ample precedent for what I am doing. Socrates, for example, examined the religious beliefs of his contemporaries-- especially the belief that we ought to do what the gods command--and showed them to be both ill-founded and conceptually confused. I wish to follow in his footsteps though not to share in his fate. A glass of wine, not of poison, would be my preferred reward.

Control measures, such as “lockdowns”, have been widely used to suppress the COVID-19 pandemic. Under some conditions, they prevent illness and save lives. But they also exact an economic toll. How should we balance the impact of such policies on individual lives and livelihoods (and other dimensions of concern) to determine which is best? A widely used method of policy evaluation, benefit–cost analysis (BCA), answers these questions by converting all the effects of a policy into monetary equivalents and then summing (...) them up. A different method, social welfare analysis, proceeds by determining the effects of a policy on individual wellbeing and then applying an aggregation formula to them to evaluate the overall effects of a policy. In this chapter, we survey these methods and argue that social welfare analysis has important advantages. One crucial advantage is that it enables ethical considerations relating to the impact of policies on individual wellbeing and its distribution to be incorporated into policy assessments in a transparent way. We illustrate this with a simple numerical model for evaluating pandemic policies that vary in terms of the stringency of the controls that they impose on individual behaviour, showing how the evaluation depends on the ethical significance accorded to their impact on the wellbeing of different age and income groups. (shrink)

This paper argues that God is not logically able to condemn a person to Hell by considering what is entailed by accepting the best argument to the contrary, the so-called free will defense expounded by Christian apologists Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig. It argues that the free will defense is logically fallacious, involves a philosophical fiction, and is based on a fraudulent account of Scripture, concluding that the problem of postmortem evil puts would-be believers in a logical and moral (...) straightjacket from which there is no escape without heresy or contradiction. -/- 1. Imagining an Afterlife in Hell -- 2. Essential Doctrines of Christianity -- 3. The Logical Puzzle Involved -- 4. Plumbing the Depths of Christian Doctrine a Little - 4.1 Christianity’s Commitment to Theism - 4.1.1 God’s Omnipotence - 4.1.2 God’s Omniscience - 4.1.3 God’s Omnibenevolence (Moral Perfection) - 4.2 The Doctrines of Salvation and Damnation - 4.2.1 Salvation and Heaven - 4.2.2 Damnation and Hell - 4.2.3 The Inhabitants of Hell – 5. The Issue of Inconsistency Again - 5.1 The Missing Concept of Responsibility - 5.2 God’s Responsibility for Evil in General - 5.3 The Charge of Inconsistency Reinforced -- 6. The Christian Cross: A Logical Straightjacket -- 7. The Art of Apologetics -- 8. Craig’s Apologetics - 8.1 Craig’s Purported Proof of Consistency - 8.1.1 A Problem with the Entailment Condition - 8.1.2 A Problem with the Consistency Condition - 8.1.3 Is Craig’s Optimal World the Best God Could Create? - 8.1.4 A Heavenly Refutation - 8.1.5 “Heaven Isn’t a Possible World” - 8.1.6 “Heaven Isn’t a Feasible World” -- 9. Free Will, Foreknowledge, and Predestination - 9.1 Compatibilist versus Incompatibilist Meanings of “Free Will” - 9.2 Free Will, Predestination, and Being Sent to Hell - 9.3 Consequences of Being Predestined to Hell -- 10. Summary. (shrink)

The question before us is "Can there be an objective morality without God?" By the term "God" we shall mean the God in whom Christians believe, the God of the Bible, not some abstract Higher Power or New Age deity. Dr. Chamberlain believes that the biblical God exists, and that if he didn't exist, there could be no objective moral truths. For myself, I once believed in such a God, but no longer do. My non-belief, however, doesn't mean that I (...) am a moral nihilist, denying that statements about right and wrong are ever objectively true. On the contrary I will argue that there can be objective ethics in the absence of any god whatever. And I'll argue, further, that the existence of objective moral truths actually requires the non-existence of such a God. (shrink)

Many things in the natural world work so well that they seem to have been designed. But by what? Could nature itself, by processes including those of evolution, be the designer? Or must their complex structure and function be attributed to some intelligent designer or God? Is natural design compatible with intelligent design? How good is the argument from the presence of design to an intelligent designer? And if we could legitimately infer the probable existence of an intelligent designer from (...) the presence of design in the natural world, what could we then infer about that designer's nature? (shrink)

1. The Down Under Logical Disproof of the Theist's God 1.1 Plantinga's Attempted Refutation of the Logical Disproof 1.2 Plantinga Refuted and God Disproved: A Preview 2. Plantinga's Formal Presentation of his Free Will Defense 3. First Formal Flaw: A Non Sequitur Regarding the Consistency of (3) with (1) 4. Further Flaws Regarding the Joint Conditions of Consistency and Entailment 4.1 A Non Sequitur Regarding the Entailment Condition 4.2 Telling the Full Story in Order to Satisfy the Entailment Condition 4.3 (...) Two Non Sequiturs Involving the Consistency Condition 4.4 The Russell Scenario: A Refutation by Logical Analogy 5. Plantinga's Leibnizian Definition of Omnipotence 5.1 Logical Consequences of the Definition 5.2 Why Leibniz Didn't Lapse 5.3 A Fatal Equivocation Over the Scope of Transworld Depravity 5.4 It Was All "Up to God" 5.5 The Distinction Between Absolute and Consequential Modalities 5.6 Plantinga's Ploy 5.7 Plantinga's Modal Muddle 5.8 Interlude on the Prevalence of the Modal Muddle 5.9 Back to Plantinga's Modal Muddle 5.10 Interim Verdict 6. Judgment Day: God Almighty and All Knowing Not Morally Perfect.. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis has forced a difficult trade-off between limiting the health impacts of the virus and maintaining economic activity. Welfare economics offers tools to conceptualize this trade-off so that policy-makers and the public can see clearly what is at stake. We review four such tools: the Value of Statistical Life (VSL); the Value of Statistical Life Years (VSLYs); Quality-Adjusted Life-Years (QALYs); and social welfare analysis, and argue that the latter are superior. We also discuss how to choose policies that (...) differentially affect people’s wellbeing. We argue in favor of evaluating policies using a Social Welfare Function (SWF), which evaluates the possible distributions of wellbeing across individuals that may result from a policy. Such a function, we argue, should regard increases in the wellbeing of the less well-off as especially valuable. We then use a model to illustrate how such a framework can help evaluate two broad policy types in response to the pandemic: eradication of the virus, and more lenient control of the spread. Our model reveals how such evaluations depend on many empirical facts but also on key value judgments about the relative importance of health and on the extent of special concern for the worse off. The purpose of this brief is not to make precise recommendations, as conditions vary widely across countries and over time, but to provide a methodology. (shrink)

Human bodies have a totally different mode of existence from those collections of mental properties (intelligence, will power, consciousness, etc.) that we call minds. They belong to the ontological category of physical substances or entities, whereas mental properties belong to the ontological category of properties or attributes, and as such can exist only so long as their physical bearers exist. Mental properties “emerge” (in a sense that makes emergence ubiquitous throughout the natural world) when the constituent parts of a biological (...) organism—especially its brain—are configured in certain sorts of ways. A view of reality that is both conceptually coherent and scientifically comprehensive makes the very idea of surviving one’s bodily death literally absurd. -/- 1. The Cheshire Cat Fallacy: “A Grin Without a Cat” -- 2. Two Main Arguments for Substance Dualism - 2.1 An Appeal to the Logic of Identity and Difference - 2.2 An Appeal to the Noncogitative Nature of Matter -- 3. A Host of Problems for Substance Dualism - 3.1 The Inexplicability of Mind-Brain Dependence - 3.2 The Inexplicability of Mental Causation - 3.3 The Violation of Scientific Laws - 3.4 Minds as Miracle-Workers - 3.5 Problems about Our Embryological and Developmental Histories - 3.6 Problems about our Evolutionary Histories - 3.7 Which Stage of the Soul or Mind Survives? - 3.8 Where are our Disembodied Souls Supposed to Survive? -- 4. The Argument from Leibniz’s Law Presupposes a Category Misallocation - 4.1 The Fallacy of Reification - 4.2 Resisting the Reifying Lure of Language - 4.3 Dualistic Consequences of Reifying Mentalistic Terms - 4.4 Allocation to Ontological Categories - 4.5 Locke’s Partial Solution to the Category Misallocation - 4.6 Ryle on Category Mistakes and “the Ghost in the Machine” - 4.7 Ryle’s Important Insight: To Have a Mind is to have a Set of Mental Properties - 4.8 Interim Summary -- 5. The Emergence of “Minds” from Incogitative Matter - 5.1 Locke’s A Priori Argument - 5.2 Locke’s Argument Refuted by Counterexamples - 5.3 The Concept of Emergence Defined - 5.4 Rival Concepts of Emergence - 5.5 The Ubiquitousness of Emergent Properties - 5.6 The Metaphysics of Emergent Materialism - 5.6.1 Substance Monism - 5.6.2 The Doctrine of Property Dualism is Misconceived - 5.6.3 Emergent Properties of Different Kinds - 5.6.4 The “Hierarchy” of Sciences - 5.6.5 The Broad Spectrum of “Mental” Properties -- 6. The Metaphysical Impossibility of Survival - 6.1 Mind-Brain Dependence - 6.2 The Issue of Mental Causation - 6.2.1 The Bogeyman of Epiphenomenalism - 6.3 The Violation of Scientific Laws - 6.4 Minds as Miracle-Workers - 6.5 Our Embryological and Developmental Histories - 6.6 Our Evolutionary Histories -- 7. Conclusion. (shrink)

Infinite regress arguments are used by philosophers as methods of refutation. A hypothesis is defective if it generates an infinite series when either such a series does not exist or its supposed existence would not serve the explanatory purpose for which it was postulated.

Although most cogently formulated by philosophers such as St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), al Ghazali (1058-1111), and Gottfried Leibniz (1646- 1716), cosmological arguments have a powerful appeal also to those nonphilosophers who feel that the "ultimate" explanation for the existence of the natural universe is that it was created by some sort of supernatural entity, viz., God.

Some Christians do in fact think of the question euphemistically, like this. And some like to suppose, further, that when the children find that Hawaii is a bit like hell - it's far too hot and the locals are giving them a hard time - Father will relent and welcome them to his mansions on high.

The MODAL property of contingency is attributed to something X (for instance, a PROPOSITION, STATE OF AFFAIRS, EVENT, or - more debatably - an object) just when X is neither impossible nor necessary, i.e., is both possible and nonnecessary.

The abstract noun "Determinism" functions like a family name for a group of philosophical doctrines each of which asserts that, in some sense or other, events occur of necessity when and as they do. Different members of the family stake out different doctrinal territories, some construing the necessity involved in purely logical terms, some in causal terms, and still others in terms of predictability. Each has to do with necessary connections between past, present and future.

On the face of it, the answer is "Yes." Hence it is not surprising that many people who say they believe in God like to appeal to Einstein's authority in defense of their own beliefs. It gives them comfort to be able to say that such a great man shared their religious beliefs.

His disagreements with them were philosophical. Just as he rejected their claim that experimental results in quantum mechanics implied that nothing exists unless it is being observed by a conscious human being, so also he disagreed with their claim that these results implied that the so-called “deterministic” philosophy of Newtonian mechanics was false.

He did so because he had long disagreed with a lot of the most important and influential physicists of his time, about the interpretation of that area of physics known as quantum physics that deals with the behaviour of objects in the microphysical, subatomic, world. Many of these physicists were committed to an interpretation from which it follows that nothing - the moon included - exists unless it is being observed. Einstein wanted to know whether Pais was on his side (...) or theirs. (shrink)

The belief in fatalism, like many others, has its roots in the quasi-religious mythologies of ancient peoples many of whom personified the notion of fate. Thus Greek mythology supposed that three Fates, daughters of the goddess of Necessity, had control of our lives from beginning to end and that it was therefore impossible for us to do anything contrary to what they had prescribed for us. We may think we are in control of our own destinies. But we are mistaken. (...) Both Homer's Odysseus and Aeschelus's Prometheus Unbound, depict mortals as puppets of the gods. (shrink)

Some children seem blessed, almost from birth, with a capacity for critical thinking. They won't let a fallacious argument pass unnoticed or unscathed. And some are fortunate enough to be exposed at an early age to fine examples of good reasoning. In their listening and their reading they learn, by intellectual osmosis as it were, to think logically. Yet even these fortunate ones, like the rest of us, can benefit by having their logical intuitions and reasoning skills sharpened by precept (...) and practice. (shrink)

Some Christians do in fact think of the question euphemistically, like this. And some like to suppose, further, that when the children find that Hawaii is a bit like hell - it's far too hot and the locals are giving them a hard time - Father will relent and welcome them to his mansions on high.