Online research in philosophy

This book treats the question of what a human person is and the ethical and political controversies of abortion, hedonism and drug-taking, euthanasia, and sex ethics. It defends the position that human beings are both body and soul, with a fundamental and morally important difference from other animals. It defends the traditional position on the most controversial specific moral and political issues of the day.

I reply to an article in the ACPA Proceedings of 2001 by John Crosby in which he challenged the position that evil as such is a privation. Each of his arguments attempts to present a counterexample to the privation position. His first argument, claiming that annihilation is evil but not a privation, fails to consider that a privation need not be contemporaneous with the subject suffering the privation. Contrary to his second argument, I explain that the repugnance of pain is (...) consistent with its being good in the appropriate context. Against his third argument I contend that he mistakenly supposes that a choice’s being opposed to the good is incompatible with its being evil because of a disorder. I conclude by briefly reviewing one central argument for the privation position and contrast it with Crosby’s arguments, which, in addition to their other problems, fail to specify any intensional content, beyond repugnance in the case of pain, for the concept of evil. (shrink)

Although there is a significant number of books and essays in which Aquinas's thought is examined in some detail, there are still many aspects of his writings that remain unknown to those outside the field of Thomistic studies; or which are generally misunderstood. An example is Aquinas's account of the origins of individual human life. This is the subject of a chapter in a recent book by Robert Pasnau on Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (Cambridge: CUP, 2001). Since there will (...) be readers whose only knowledge of the issues in question will come from Pasnau's account, and since that account is contentious in substance, and advanced in advocacy of a particular moral interest, it is necessary to provide another, and, we believe, more credible account of the issue of when human life begins, as this may be determined on the basis of known empirical facts and Aquinas's metaphysics, and a more accurate representation of how (and how extensively) this matter has been treated hitherto. The morality of abortion turns on two important sets of issues: the first metaphysical, concerning the beginnings of human life and the specific status of the embryo; the second, ethical, having to do with the nature and scope of value and associated moral requirements. Besides engaging in exegesis we address both issues in philosophical terms. (shrink)

The problem addressed is: whether religious belief, defined here as accepting that God has revealed and that what he has revealed is true, could ever be rational. That is, does the idea of religious belief imply that it is irrational? The author attempts to resolve this problem in favor of religious belief, and suggests how reasons can legitimately function in religious belief. The evidentialist objection to religion is answered, and it is proposed that reasons might function, not to prove that (...) God has revealed, or that what he has revealed is true, but that the choice to believe is a morally responsible one. (shrink)