Online research in philosophy

What is the relationship between divine commands and ethical duties? According to the divine command theory of ethics, moral actions are obligatory simply because God commands people to do them. This position raises a serious question about the nature of ethics, since it suggests that there is no reason, ethical or non-ethical, behind divine commands; hence both his commands and morality become arbitrary. This paper investigates the scriptural defense of the divine command theory and argues that this methodology is wrong as any interpretation of the text stands on a complex web of ethical and non-ethical presuppositions and as these presuppositions change so does the interpretation.

The simplest Divine Command Theory is one which identifies rightness with being commanded or willed by God. Two clear and appealing arguments for this theory turn on the idea that laws require a lawgiver, and the idea that God is sovereign or omnipotent. Critical examination of these arguments reveals some fundamental principles at odds with the Divine Command Theory, and yields some more penetrating versions of traditional objections to that theory.

This essay revolves around a careful assessment of Hui-chieh Loy's essay ?Justification and Debate: Thoughts on Moist Moral Epistemology?. There is much to appreciate in Loy's analysis of the standard of sound doctrine in the ?Against Fatalism? chapters of the Mozi, but a close reading of Loy's essay reveals problematic aspects in his approach along both hermeneutic and logical lines. For one, he groups Mozi's tests of the standard of sound doctrine in a way that does not square well with how they are grouped in the primary text. I call this the problem of alignment. Secondly, he conflates the notions of standard and test. I refer to this as the problem of implementation insofar as such conflation causes the tests to be implemented in a way that they did not seem to be intended to be by Mozi, that is, each on its own as constituting sound doctrine instead of taking them all together as the indicator of sound doctrine.

doctrines of the three Mohist factions mentioned in the Hanfeizi and Zhuangzi (Yu Yue; see his preface to Mozi Jian Gu). The digest theory: Most of the essays can be attributed to three different..

: It is argued here that Mozi's critique of warfare in the chapter "Against Offensive War" ("Fei gong") cannot be fully understood without the arguments presented in the chapter "Explaining Ghosts" ("Ming gui"). For Mozi, the problem of war can only be resolved if the existence of providential ghosts can be proven. But he indicates in his arguments concerning the existence of ghosts that it is doubtful whether such a condition can be met. Consequently, despite the apparently optimistic tenor of chapters such as "Imperial Love" ("Jian ai"), Mozi's political thought reveals an implicit understanding of the rational limits of resolving fundamental problems of injustice in the world.

In this essay I argue that Mozi’s philosophy is anything but utilitarianism by way of analysing four ethical theories. Utilitarianism is an ethics in which the moral subject is an atomic individual human being, and its concern is how to fulfill the interests of the individual self and the social majority. Confucian ethics is centered on the notion of the family and its basic question is that of priority in the relationship between the small self and the enlarged or collective self. Opposite to these two moral theories is Mozi’s ethics: The interests that Mozi is primarily concerned with are not the interests of my individual self or my collective self, but the interests of the other. The fulfillment of the material needs of the other is my moral obligation. The arguments are centered on the three basic concepts, “the I,” “the we,” and “the other.” The significance of Mozi’s thought in modern or postmodern context lies in its striking resemblance to the philosophy of a contemporary western philosopher, Levinas. In both Mozi and Levinas, there is a suspension of utilitarianism.

, originally was not an independent chapter in the Fei Gong (Condemning Aggression) series, but rather part of the ending of Mozi 26, the first of the Tian Zhi ¤Ñ§Ó (Heaven’s Intention) chapters. I will argue that we have no reason to..

The most significant contemporary controversy surrounding the interpretation of the moral thought of Mozi is the debate over his ultimate criterion for right action. The problem is that there are two significant candidates found in the text of the Mozi.1 One is a kind of utilitarian principle: whatever benefits the world is right and whatever harms the world is wrong. The other is a divine will principle: whatever Heaven desires is right and whatever Heaven disapproves of is wrong. Both principles play an undeniably important role in Mozi's system, but their precise relationship is surprisingly difficult to determine. Is one more fundamental than the other? If so, which? And what purpose does the less basic of the ..

In the Western studies of the texts of Mozi, three distinctive views have surfaced in the past few decades: (1) Mozi is inconsistent because he seems to have been committed to both a Utilitarian standard and a divine command theory; (2) Mozi is a divine command theorist who argues that it is right to benefit the world because it is the will of heaven; and (3) Mozi is a utilitarian thinker who has based morality on the criterion of whether actions benefit the world. In this paper, I will argue that the whole debate about whether Mozi is a divine command theorist or a utilitarian is misguided, because it is based on an incorrect understanding of the fundamental cultural perspective associated with the notion of Tian. An adequate understanding of the notion of Tian will reveal its fundamental difference from the Western notion of heaven. Such an understanding will enable us to put Mozi's moral philosophy in the ancient Chinese perspective in which a tension and potential conflict between 'the will of heaven' and 'the benefit of the world' simply cannot arise.

We claim that divine command metaethicists have not thought through the nature of the expression of divine love with sufficient rigor. We argue, against prior divine command theories, that the radical difference between God and the natural world means that grounding divine command in divine love can only ground a formal claim of the divine on the human; recipients of revelation must construct particular commands out of this formal claim. While some metaethicists might respond to us by claiming that this account leads to an inability to judge between better and worse constructions of the commanded life, we propose that an analysis of the human response to divine love--theological eros--can be the basis for an articulation of a philosophical theology (in our case, negative theology) that can guide the religious believer toward generating particular principles for ethical action that are grounded in an account of divine action. By linking divine command to imitatio Dei, the believer can have confidence that her imitative acts of God are not inaccurate constructions of the commanded life.