25 found
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  1. What You're Rejecting When You're Expecting.Blake Hereth - 2023 - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry (3):1-12.
    I defend two collapsing or reductionist arguments against Weak Pro-Natalism (WPN), the view that procreation is generally merely permissible. In particular, I argue that WPN collapses into Strong Pro-Natalism (SPN), the view that procreation is generally obligatory. Because SPN conflicts with the dominant view that procreation is never obligatory, demonstrating that WPN collapses into or entails SPN establishes epistemic parity (at least as concerns reproductive liberty) between WPN and Anti-Natalism (AN), the view that procreation is always impermissible. First, I distinguish (...)
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  2.  41
    Sanctuary Cities and Non-Refoulement.Michael Blake & Blake Hereth - 2020 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (2):457-474.
    More than two hundred cities in the United States have now declared themselves to be sanctuary cities. This declaration involves a commitment to non-compliance with federal law; the sanctuary city will refuse to use its own juridical power – including, more crucially, its own police powers – to assist the federal government in the deportation of undocumented residents. We will argue that the sanctuary city might be morally defensible, even if deportation is not always wrong, and even if the federal (...)
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  3. Animal Gods.Blake Hereth - 2019 - In Blake Hereth & Kevin Timpe (eds.), The Lost Sheep in Philosophy of Religion: New Perspectives on Disability, Gender, Race, and Animals. New York: Routledge. pp. 183-207.
    Most theists accept an anthropomorphic view of the divine: a God whose cognition and incarnate embodiment closely resembles human cognition and human embodiment. Most theists also accept an Anselmian view of God on which God has the maximal set of ontological (including moral) perfections. This chapter defends the view that Anselmianism entails that the anthropomorphic view of God is false and that some nonhuman animal is divine. Two arguments are given for this position, which we can call zootheism. The first (...)
     
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  4.  63
    Here’s Not Looking at You, Kid: A New Defense of Anti-Natalism.Blake Hereth & Anthony Ferrucci - 2021 - South African Journal of Philosophy 40 (1):14-33.
    Anti-natalism is the view that persons ought morally to refrain from procreation. We offer a new argument for a principled version of anti-natalism according to which it is always impermissible to procreate in the actual world since doing so will violate the right to physical security of future, created persons once those persons exist and have the right. First, we argue that procreators can be responsible for non-trivial harms that befall future persons even if they do not cause them and (...)
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  5.  53
    Heavenly Overpopulation: Rethinking the Ethics of Procreation.Blake Hereth - 2024 - Agatheos: European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 1 (2):76-97.
    Many theists believe both (1) that Heaven will be infinitely or maximally good for its residents and (2) that most humans will, eventually, reside in Heaven. Further, most theists believe (3) that human procreation is often all-things-considered morally permissible. I defend three novel arguments for the impermissibility of procreation predicated on the possibility of heavenly overpopulation. First, we shouldn’t be rude to hosts by bringing more people to a party than were invited, which we do if we continue to procreate. (...)
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  6. Moral Excuse to the Pacifist's Rescue.Blake Hereth - 2023 - Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence:1-32.
    Pacifism is the view that necessarily, the nonconsensual harming of pro tanto rights-bearers is all-things-considered morally impermissible. Critics of pacifism frequently point to common moral intuitions about self-defenders and other-defenders as evidence that pacifism is false and that self- and other-defense are often morally justified. I call this the Justification View and defend its rival, the Excuse View. According to the latter, a robust view of moral excuse adequately explains the common moral intuitions invoked against pacifism and is compatible with (...)
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  7. In Defense of Animal Universalism.Blake Hereth, Shawn Graves & Tyler John - 2017 - In T. Ryan Byerly & Eric J. Silverman (eds.), Paradise Understood: New Philosophical Essays About Heaven. Oxford University Press. pp. 161-192.
    This paper defends “Animal Universalism,” the thesis that all sentient non-human animals will be brought into Heaven and remain there for eternity. It assumes that God exists and is all-powerful, perfectly loving, and perfectly just. From these background theses, the authors argue that Animal Universalism follows. If God is perfectly loving, then God is concerned about the well-being of non-human animals, and God chooses to maximize the well-being of each individual animal when doing so does not harm other individual creatures (...)
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  8.  57
    Animal Rights Pacifism.Blake Hereth - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (12):4053-4082.
    The Animal Rights Thesis (ART) entails that nonhuman animals like pigs and cows have moral rights, including rights not to be unjustly harmed. If ART is true, it appears to imply the permissibility of killing ranchers, farmers, and zookeepers in defense of animals who will otherwise be unjustly killed. This is the Militancy Objection (MO) to ART. I consider four replies to MO and reject three of them. First, MO fails because animals lack rights, or lack rights of sufficient strength (...)
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  9. Honorable Survivors: A Feminist Reply to Statman.Blake Hereth - forthcoming - Public Affairs Quarterly.
    Helen Frowe (2014) depicts the following fictional case: Fran is being raped by Eric and can’t stop him with violent resistance. Nevertheless, she resists and breaks Eric’s wrist. The infliction of defensive harm on Eric is intuitively permissible, yet it runs counter to the dominant view that defensive harms must stand a reasonable chance of success. Call this the Success Condition (SC). To solve this problem, Daniel Statman (2008) contends that even if Victim’s defensive harms fail to prevent her rape, (...)
     
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  10.  36
    Health Justice for Unjust Combatants.Blake Hereth - 2021 - Journal of Military Ethics 20 (1):67-81.
    Are field medics morally permitted to treat unjust combatants? I distinguish between two kinds of enemy combatants: reactivated ones who will rejoin the fight, and deactivated ones who will not rejoin the fight. Helen Frowe has argued that field medics are not permitted to treat reactivated combatants but is silent about deactivated ones. First, I argue that Frowe’s account plausibly extends to a moral prohibition on treating deactivated combatants in addition to reactivated ones. Second, I argue that the best argument (...)
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  11.  38
    Against Self-Defense.Blake Hereth - 2017 - Social Theory and Practice 43 (3):613-635.
    The ethics of self-defense is dominated by the Orthodox View, which claims that at least some cases of self-defensive assault are permissible. I defend the radical view that there are no permissible instances of self-defensive assault. My argument proceeds as follows: Every permissible act of self-defensive assault could, in principle, have its permissibility be massively overdetermined. Such ‘super-permissible’ acts of assault are ones in which agents are objectively permitted to perform those acts in morally trivializing or cavalier fashion: that is, (...)
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  12.  57
    Why It’s Wrong to Stand Your Ground.Blake Hereth - 2017 - Philosophy in the Contemporary World 24 (1):40-50.
    Stand Your Ground laws have prompted frequent and sustained legal and ethical reflection on self-defense. Two primary views have emerged in the literature: the Stand Your Ground View and the Retreat View. On the former view, there is no presumptive moral requirement to retreat even if one can do so safely. According to the latter view, there is such a requirement. I offer a novel argument against the Stand Your Ground View. In cases where retreat or the infliction of defensive (...)
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  13. The Shape of Trans Afterlife Justice.Blake Hereth - 2020 - In Michelle Panchuk & Michael C. Rea (eds.), Voices from The Edge: Centering Marginalized Perspectives in Analytic Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Trans persons endure terrible injustices in this life: They are bullied, murdered, forced to conceal their identities, and denied opportunities that would be available to them if they were cis. This chapter offers grounds for theological hope—in particular, hope that the afterlife would be better for trans persons. I argue that we should view trans identities as worthy of respect and that, as a matter of justice, their gender identities should be preserved in the afterlife. I focus specifically on trans (...)
     
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  14. Heavenly Procreation.Blake Hereth - 2022 - Faith and Philosophy 39 (1):100-123.
    Kenneth Einar Himma (2009, 2016) argues that the existence of Hell renders procreation impermissible. Jason Marsh (2015) contends that problems of evil motivate anti-natalism. Anti-natalism is principally rejected for its perceived conflict with reproductive rights. I propose a theistic solution to the latter problem. Universalism says that all persons will, postmortem, eventually be eternally housed in Heaven, a superbly good place wherein harm is fully absent. The acceptance of universalism is now widespread, but I offer further reason to embrace one (...)
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  15. (1 other version)Queer Advice to Christian Philosophers.Blake Hereth - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (1):49-75.
    Philosophy of religion is dominated by Christianity and by Christians. This, in conjunction with the historically anti-LGBTQIA bent of Christian thinking, has resulted in the exclusion of less dominant and often marginalized perspectives, including queer ones. This essay charts a normative direction for Christian philosophers and for philosophy of religion, a subfield they dominate. First, given some of the unique ways Christian philosophy and philosophers have unjustly harmed queers, Christian philosophers as a group have a responsibility to communities their group (...)
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  16. Two Arguments for Animal Immortality.Blake Hereth - 2017 - In Simon Cushing (ed.), Heaven and Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. pp. 171-200.
    Some, like the Scholastics, held that nonhuman animals could not survive bodily death and would therefore be absent in any afterlife. Against them, I argue that all sentient animals lacking moral agency are immortal and that their immortality is good for them. Call this thesis Animal Immortalism. This paper offers two arguments for Animal Immortalism: the Faultless Harm Argument and the Just Compensation Argument. According to the former, because death and eternal misery are harms to sentient animals to which they (...)
     
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  17.  87
    Mary, Did You Consent?Blake Hereth - 2021 - Religious Studies:1-24.
    The Christian and Islamic doctrine of the VIRGIN BIRTH claim God asexually impregnated the Virgin Mary with Jesus, Mary’s impregnation was fully consensual (VIRGIN CONSENT), and God never acts immorally (DIVINE GOODNESS). First, I show that God’s actions and Mary’s background beliefs undermine her consent by virtue of coercive incentives, Mary’s comparative powerlessness, and the generation of moral conflicts. Second, I show that God’s nondisclosure of certain reasonably relevant facts undermines Mary’s informed consent. Third, I show that a recent attempt (...)
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  18.  63
    Moral Neuroenhancement for Prisoners of War.Blake Hereth - 2022 - Neuroethics 15 (1):1-20.
    Moral agential neuroenhancement can transform us into better people. However, critics of MB raise four central objections to MANEs use: It destroys moral freedom; it kills one moral agent and replaces them with another, better agent; it carries significant risk of infection and illness; it benefits society but not the enhanced person; and it’s wrong to experiment on nonconsenting persons. Herein, I defend MANE’s use for prisoners of war fighting unjustly. First, the permissibility of killing unjust combatants entails that, in (...)
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  19.  33
    Can We Justify Military Enhancements? Some Yes, Most No.Nicholas Evans & Blake Hereth - 2022 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 31 (4):557-569.
    The United States Department of Defense has, for at least 20 years, held the stated intention to enhance active military personnel (“warfighters”). This intention has become more acute in the face of dropping recruitment, an aging fighting force, and emerging strategic challenges. However, developing and testing enhancements is clouded by the ethically contested status of enhancements, the long history of abuse by military medical researchers, and new legislation in the guise of “health security” that has enabled the Department of Defense (...)
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  20.  31
    Self-Defense for Theists.Blake Hereth - 2022 - Journal of Analytic Theology 10:246-276.
    According to Theistic Defensive Incompatibilism, common theistic commitments limit the scope or explanation of permissible self-defense. In this essay, I offer six original arguments for Theistic Defensive Incompatibilism. The first four arguments concern narrow proportionality: the requirement that the defensive harm inflicted on unjust threateners not exceed the harm they threaten. Hellism, Annihilationism, and Danteanism each imply that narrow proportionality is rarely satisfied, whereas Universalism implies that killing never harms. The final two arguments concern wide proportionality, or the requirement that (...)
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  21.  31
    The Lost Sheep in Philosophy of Religion: New Perspectives on Disability, Gender, Race, and Animals.Blake Hereth & Kevin Timpe (eds.) - 2019 - New York: Routledge.
    "Contemporary research in philosophy of religion is dominated by traditional problems such as the nature of evil, arguments against theism, issues of foreknowledge and freedom, the divine attributes, and religious pluralism. This volume instead focuses on unrepresented and underrepresented issues in the discipline. The essays address how issues like race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, feminist and pantheist conceptions of the divine, and nonhuman animals connect to existing issues in philosophy of religion. By staking out new avenues for (...)
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  22.  41
    Animals and Causal Impotence: A Deontological View.Blake Hereth - 2016 - Between the Species 19 (1):32-51.
    In animal ethics, some ethicists such as Peter Singer argue that we ought not to purchase animal products because doing so causally contributes to unnecessary suffering. Others, such as Russ Shafer-Landau, counter that where such unnecessary suffering is not causally dependent on one’s causal contributions, there is no duty to refrain from purchasing animal products, even if the process by which those products are produced is morally abhorrent. I argue that there are at least two plausible principles which ground the (...)
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  23. Make Them Rare or Make Them Care: Artificial Intelligence and Moral Cost-Sharing.Blake Hereth & Nicholas Evans - 2023 - In Daniel Schoeni, Tobias Vestner & Kevin Govern (eds.), Ethical Dilemmas in the Global Defense Industry. Oxford University Press.
    The use of autonomous weaponry in warfare has increased substantially over the last twenty years and shows no sign of slowing. Our chapter raises a novel objection to the implementation of autonomous weapons, namely, that they eliminate moral cost-sharing. To grasp the basics of our argument, consider the case of uninhabited aerial vehicles that act autonomously (i.e., LAWS). Imagine that a LAWS terminates a military target and that five civilians die as a side effect of the LAWS bombing. Because LAWS (...)
     
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  24. Pacifists Are Admirable Only if They're Right.Blake Hereth - forthcoming - Public Affairs Quarterly.
    The recent explosion of philosophical papers on Confederate and Colonialist statues centers on a central question: When, if ever, is it permissible to admire a person? This paper contends it’s not just Confederates and slavers whose reputations are on the line, but also pacifists like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Daisy Bates whose commitments to pacifism meant they were unwilling to save others using defensive violence, including others they talked into endangering themselves for the sake of racial equality. Other things (...)
     
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  25. Queer Oppression and Pacifism.Blake Hereth - 2018 - In Andrew Fiala (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Pacifism and Nonviolence. Routledge. pp. 281-292.
    This chapter argues that considerations arising from queer oppression can furnish support for pacifist positions. The first consideration concerns the nature and strength of the moral presumption against violence. Violence undermines a victim’s agency, coercing them to betray their identities, not unlike “reparative therapy.” The second consideration concerns the moral presumption against conscription. Current conscription policies are cisgender-normative, threaten to coerce queer citizens to fight for unjust states that oppose their basic rights, and coerce queer citizens to risk their lives (...)
     
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