Several recent formulations of Rule Consequentialism have broken with the consensus that RC should be formulated in terms of code acceptance, claiming instead that RC should focus on the consequences of codes' being taught. I begin this article with an examination of the standard case for acceptance formulations. In addition to depending on the mistaken assumption that compliance and acceptance formulations are the only options, the standard case claims advantages for acceptance formulations that, upon closer examination, favor teaching formulations. In (...) the remainder of the article, I defend this new teaching-centered approach against some recent criticisms. I argue that preoccupation with the somewhat technical problem of identifying the best criterion for making choices under conditions of uncertainty has distracted rule consequentialists from paying more careful attention to the advantages and disadvantages that result from decisions concerning where they locate RC's stipulated assumptions within the theory. (shrink)

One standard criticism of the doctrine of continuous creation is that it entails the occasionalist position that God alone is a true cause and that the events we commonly identify as causes are merely the occasions upon which God brings about effects. I begin by clearly stating Malebranche's argument from continuous creation to occasionalism. Next, I examine two strategies for resisting Malebranche's argument – strong and weak concurrentism – and argue that weak concurrentism is the more promising strategy. Finally, I (...) argue that weak concurrentism requires a necessitarian approach to secondary causation. (shrink)

Recent formulations of rule-consequentialism have attempted to select the ideal moral code based on realistic assumptions of imperfect acceptance. But this introduces further problems. What assumptions about acceptance would be realistic? And what criterion should we use to identify the ideal code? The solutions suggested in the recent literature all calculate a code's value using formulas that stipulate some uniform rate of acceptance. After pointing out a number of difficulties with these approaches, I introduce a formulation of RC on which (...) non-uniform acceptance rates are calculated rather than stipulated. In addition to making more realistic assumptions about acceptance rates, Calculated Rates RC has several other advantages: it gives equal consideration to both acceptance and compliance rates and it brings RC more in line with our intuitive ways of thinking about rules and their consequences. (shrink)

One standard criticism of the doctrine of continuous creation is that it entails the occasionalist position that God alone is a true cause and that the events we commonly identify as causes are merely the occasions upon which God brings about effects. I begin by clearly stating Malebranche's argument from continuous creation to occasionalism. Next, I examine two strategies for resisting Malebranche's argument ??? strong and weak concurrentism ??? and argue that weak concurrentism is the more promising strategy. Finally, I (...) argue that weak concurrentism requires a necessitarian approach to secondary causation. (shrink)

The traditional view of divine conservation holds that it is simply a continuation of the initial act of creation. In this essay, I defend the continuous-creation tradition against William Lane Craig's criticism that continuous creation fundamentally misconstrues the intuitive distinction between creation and conservation. According to Craig, creation is the unique causal activity of bringing new patient entities into existence, while conservation involves acting upon already existing patient entities to cause their continued existence. I defend continuous creation by challenging Craig's (...) intuitive distinction and by showing that the alternative account of creation and conservation he bases upon it is fraught with serious internal difficulties. (shrink)

The traditional view of divine conservation holds that it is simply a continuation of the initial act of creation. In this essay, I defend the continuous-creation tradition against William Lane Craig's criticism that continuous creation fundamentally misconstrues the intuitive distinction between creation and conservation. According to Craig, creation is the unique causal activity of bringing new patient entities into existence, while conservation involves acting upon already existing patient entities to cause their continued existence. I defend continuous creation by challenging Craig's (...) intuitive distinction and by showing that the alternative account of creation and conservation he bases upon it is fraught with serious internal difficulties. (shrink)

In 2011 an American Christian radio broadcaster named Harold Camping attracted massive media attention, and some actual following, for his prediction that on May 21 of that year Christ would return to earth and rapture away the faithful, carrying them heavenward, while the rest went through terrible earthly tribulations that would culminate five months later with the end of the world. It was not Camping's first exercise in date-setting; he had earlier published predictions of the end in 1988 and 1994. (...) When May 22, 2011, dawned with the faithful still very much earthbound, Camping revised his date forward to October 21, 2011.Harold Camping is hardly the first to set dates for the various events in the .. (shrink)

This anthology offers a comprehensive historical introduction to the central questions of philosophy of religion. Approximately two-thirds of the selections are from ancient, medieval, and modern sources, helping students to understand and engage the rich traditions of reflection on these timeless questions. The remaining contemporary readings introduce students to the more recent developments in the field. Each of the thematically arranged sections begins with an editor's introduction to clarify the central issues and positions presented in the readings that follow. Topics (...) include: * traditional theistic arguments * religious experience and revelation * fideism * naturalistic approaches to religious belief * the divine attributes * fate, freedom, and foreknowledge * the connection between religion and morality * the problem of evil * death and immortality * religious diversity * faith, reason, and the ethics of belief * science and religion. The text can be used alone or in conjunction with a secondary text in philosophy of religion such as Zagzebski's "Philosophy of Religion: An Historical Introduction" (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). (shrink)

Online exam supervision technologies have recently generated significant controversy and concern. Their use is now booming due to growing demand for online courses and for off-campus assessment options amid COVID-19 lockdowns. Online proctoring technologies purport to effectively oversee students sitting online exams by using artificial intelligence systems supplemented by human invigilators. Such technologies have alarmed some students who see them as a “Big Brother-like” threat to liberty and privacy, and as potentially unfair and discriminatory. However, some universities and educators defend (...) their judicious use. Critical ethical appraisal of online proctoring technologies is overdue. This essay provides one of the first sustained moral philosophical analyses of these technologies, focusing on ethical notions of academic integrity, fairness, non-maleficence, transparency, privacy, autonomy, liberty, and trust. Most of these concepts are prominent in the new field of AI ethics, and all are relevant to education. The essay discusses these ethical issues. It also offers suggestions for educational institutions and educators interested in the technologies about the kinds of inquiries they need to make and the governance and review processes they might need to adopt to justify and remain accountable for using online proctoring technologies. The rapid and contentious rise of proctoring software provides a fruitful ethical case study of how AI is infiltrating all areas of life. The social impacts and moral consequences of this digital technology warrant ongoing scrutiny and study. (shrink)

"The sixties' political agenda may have been ground down to ambiguity at best, but moral and spiritual America will never again be quite what it was before the coming of the hippies, and Miller has shown how and why."—Robert S. Ellwood, University of Southern California The hippies of the late 1960s were cultural dissenters who, among other things, advocated drastic rethinking of certain traditional American values and standards. In this lucid, lively survey, Timothy Miller traces the movement's ethical innovations and (...) analyzes the impact of its ideas on subsequent American culture. Dedicated to such tenets as the primacy of love, trust in intuition and direct experience, the rejection of meaningless work, and a disdain for money and materialism, the hippies advocated dropping out of the dominant culture, and proposed new and more permissive ethics in several areas. They argued that, while some drugs were indeed harmful, others provided useful insights and experiences and therefore should be freely available and widely used. They endorsed a liberal ethics of sex, in which no sexual act between or among consenting adults would be banned. They developed an ethics of rock-and-roll music, arguing that rock was the language of a generation and that it helped promote new ways of thinking and living. They also revived the venerable American tradition of communal living. In contrast to most available literature on the 1960s, this book deals with the cultural revolutionaries and not the political radicals of the New Left. And instead of relying on later interviews with persons who were active in the 1960s, Miller draws mainly on underground newspapers of the day, the most important literary creation of the hippies themselves. The result is a historical encounter of rare immediacy. Timothy Miller is assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas. (shrink)

The foundation of W. Matthews Grant's project in Free Will and God's Universal Causality is his Non-Occasionalist version of Divine Universal Causality, which affirms the traditional concurrentist idea that God and secondary causes cooperate non-superfluously in such a way that they both produce the entire effect. Grant defends NODUC's concurrentist account by responding to ‘The Metaphysical Objection’, which alleges that concurrentism places an inconsistent set of demands upon secondary causes. I argue that Grant's responses to that objection are unconvincing, and (...) thus, he fails to demonstrate that NODUC is a stable foundation for the rest of his project. (shrink)

Work on the counterculture of the 1960s era usually doesn't do a lot with the art that accompanied and enriched the cultural upheaval of the time. The counterculture was spectacularly visual, what with the flamboyant clothing and exultation of the body that were everywhere, and yes, there were some notable artists such as the whimsical Peter Max, but the great creativity that was so much the engine and product of the counterculture has rarely received its due. At the same time, (...) the fact that the rise of countercultural art had more than a little to do with moving the American art scene westward from New York has hardly been noted until now. As the editors write in their introduction, "The unfortunate fate of the... (shrink)

Lyman Tower Sargent has been the preeminent scholar of utopianism in our time and has undertaken a diverse network of approaches to the study of what he has called “social dreaming.” He has written monographs, articles, and essays and has been a relentless compiler of information on utopianism heretofore largely overlooked by his peers. One of the main directions of his work has been bibliographical, as he has compiled guides to the vast corpus of utopianism that he has uncovered.

The Knights of Saint John, founded after the conquest of Jerusalem , were renowned in Europe as Christian soldiers. They were, however, equally famous for their charities, especially for their great Hospital in Jerusalem. As modern scholarship has demonstrated, the Knights' Hospital influenced many new institutions in the cities of the high Middle Ages and encouraged the development of organized centers to treat the ill. jQuery.click { event.preventDefault(); }).