Bill Pratt | January 5, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt The conventional wisdom these days is that what you do in your home is your business. If you have children, and you let them watch inappropriate TV shows or movies, then who am I to judge? After all, what you allow your kids to consume doesn’t affect me. Sometimes you’ll hear [...]
Bill Pratt | February 17, 2009
In the previous post, we found significant problems with survival ethics, the ethical theory which claims that “morality is easily explained by evolution and the tendency for biological life to survive and reproduce.” But there are more problems. Survival ethics are merely descriptive, not prescriptive. They describe the behaviors of the past that led to [...]
Bill Pratt | February 16, 2009
Have you ever heard someone say the following? ”Morality is easily explained by evolution and the tendency for biological life to survive and reproduce.” If so, read on because this post will evaluate this position to see whether it can really explain morality. If you would like to understand a little more about the theory before reading [...]
Bill Pratt | February 7, 2009
Continuing from yesterday’s post on What Is Wrong With Social Darwinism? Part 1: Fourth, morality is characterized by an “oughtness” that weighs upon us before we act. It is prescriptive, not descriptive. Ethics derived from evolution, however, are only descriptive. Ethicist Francis Beckwith offers the insight that evolutionary ethics only tells us “what behaviors in [...]
Bill Pratt | February 6, 2009
As we saw in the previous post describing social Darwinism, it was a disastrous experiment for mankind in the twentieth century, but need it have been? Certainly some dastardly individuals justified their tyrannical reigns with it, but we must take a sober look at the theory and evaluate its ability to explain the moral truths [...]
Bill Pratt | February 3, 2009
According to ethicist Francis Beckwith there are at least seven aspects of morality that appear to be true, based on mankind’s common moral experience. In the previous post, we discussed the first four. In this post, we will discuss the final three. The fifth aspect of morality is that when we break a clear moral [...]
Bill Pratt | February 2, 2009
According to ethicist Francis Beckwith there are at least seven aspects of morality that appear to be true, based on mankind’s common moral experience. First, objective moral standards are known. Any form of total moral skepticism (a view that would deny the concrete knowledge of any moral truth) cannot be true because this view would [...]
Bill Pratt | February 1, 2009
First, when one reflects on morality, there are certain objective moral facts that seem to be obvious; these facts can be known by intuition. According to ethicist Greg Koukl, “Philosophers call this kind of knowing a priori knowledge (literally, ‘from what is prior’), that which one knows prior to sense experience.” There are clear-cut actions [...]
