Neuroscientists have located brain activity that prepares or encodes action plans before agents are aware of intending to act. On the basis of these findings and broader agency research, activity in these regions has been proposed as the neural realizers of practical intention. My aim in this paper is to evaluate the case for taking these neural states to be neural representations of intention. I draw on work in philosophy of action on the role and nature of practical intentions to (...) construct a framework of the functional profile of intentions fit for empirical investigation. With this framework, I turn to the broader empirical neuroscience literature on agency to assess these proposed neural representations of intention. I argue that while these neural states in some respects satisfy the functions of intention in planning agency prospective of action, their fit with the role of intention in action execution is not well supported. I close by offering a sketch of which experimental task features could aid in the search for the neural realizer of intention in action. (shrink)

The author of Hebrews writes that Jesus Christ was “tempted as we are, yet without sin”. Many Christians take the sinlessness of Jesus to imply that he was perfectly virtuous. Yet, susceptibility to the experience of at least some temptations, plausibly including those Jesus experienced, seems incompatible with the possession of perfect virtue. In an attempt to resolve this tension, I argue here that there are good reasons for believing that Jesus, while perfectly sinless, was not fully virtuous at the (...) time of his temptations, but that he grew in virtue through overcoming temptation. If this is right, then Jesus Christ is an exemplar of character formation who is able to “sympathize with our weaknesses” in an important way that Christians have largely overlooked. (shrink)

Western theism holds that God cannot do evil. Christians also hold that Christ is God the Son and that Christ was tempted to do evil. These claims appear to be jointly inconsistent. I argue that they are not.

The ‘perfection account’ of atonement is discussed,under which Christ, on the cross,completed the perfection of human nature,establishing the full perfection of loving filial obedience, offering to the Father a perfected humanity, where these features were fundamental to the atonement. A basic perfection account is first set out. Two additional elements of the perfection account are then discussed: first, that Christ established a perfect victory over evil in our humanity; second, that on the cross Christ put to death the pull to (...) the self-life in our humanity. Reparation is then discussed. Finally,some critical questions are addressed. (shrink)

In the last 70 years there has been an explosion of philosophical and theological work on the nature of virtue and the process of virtue formation. Yet philosophers and theologians have paid little attention to the phenomenon of temptation and its role in developing virtue. Indeed, little analytic work has been done on the nature of temptation. This study aims to fill this gap in moral philosophy and theology by offering an analytic moral conception of temptation and explicating its connection (...) to the development of virtue. This project deploys a new iteration of an older methodology of integrating philosophy and theology that may now appropriately be called “analytic moral theology.” In discerning the nature of temptation and its role in virtue formation, theological sources provide foundational guidance. Analytic moral philosophy provides illumination, coherence, and conceptual robustness to the theological foundation. The argument developed follows in the footsteps of John Hick’s soul-making theodicy by contending that the development of virtue requires a world that permits of experiences of temptation. This conclusion is substantiated by a close moral analysis of the nature of temptation that builds on key works done in philosophical moral psychology, philosophy of action, and philosophical theology. The emerging conceptualization of temptation is then compared and contrasted with the closely related moral phenomenon of akrasia and weakness of will, and finally interfaced with a neo- Aristotelian conception of virtue development. In the end, Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of infused virtue is employed as a theological test of the thesis and conditions the scope of the thesis. In light of this constructive analysis of the nature of temptation and its argument for temptation’s role in acquiring moral virtue, this project makes a contribution to philosophical Christian ethics. (shrink)