Philip Devine

In recent years, analytically trained philosophers have given extensive attention to various issues involved in the “culture wars,” including abortion, same-sex marriage, stem-cell research, and assisted suicide. There are, however, moral judgments that virtually no one questions. Defenses of adult-child sex, for example, are rare. There is also “conventional immorality”—the breach of conventional moral standards within roughly defined limits that at least limit the resulting damage to third parties and social institutions. These phenomena frame moral discussion even when, as often happens, conventional people are in serious moral disagreement. In this essay I try to make sense of the phenomenon; in a subsequent essay I will show how conventional morality contains within itself the seeds of its collapse, and hence requires support from human nature, either rationally discovered or understood through revelation accepted in faith.

Raising the war on political correctness to a new and higher intellectual level, Philip Devine sheds fresh light on the whole question of cultural standards and the fashionable notion of multiculturalism. While acknowledging the diversity of ways of life and the differing belief systems that arise from and justify those ways of life, the author attacks the current exploitation of diversity to justify a militantly intolerant relativism. His wide-ranging and erudite work connects cultural issues to our real-world existence as biological and historical beings, pulling together ideas of bioethics, education, and the structure and purpose of families. This work will be of interest to those fighting the culture wars across the humanities and social and behavioral sciences.

I defend the coherence of Theistic Evolutionism, though I do not present any direct argument for either theism or (broadly Darwinian) evolution. I distinguish between evolution as a scientific theory, however well established, and evolutionism as a religion or ideology. I argue that the confusion between the two senses of evolutionism is bad for both biology and religion, and conclude by suggesting that, in Irving Kristol's words, 'our goal should be to have biology and evolution taught in a way that points to what we don't know as well as what we know'.

The denial of moral absolutes rests, I think, on a seductive but fallacious argument, which I shall attempt both to expound and to refute here. Human beings are highly complex creatures living in a highly complex world. Every human being is different from every other, every interaction or relationship between or among human beings is unique. Hence also every occasion for moral choice is also unique, and all those action kinds - be theyadultery, murder, rape, theft, ortorture on which moralists are accustomed to pass judgment include an enormous variety of differing transactions, which ideally ought to be evaluated one by one. Moreover, each proposed action has a variety of different aspects: intention, foreseen consequence, conventional meaning, and symbolic significance for example, which bear on moral choice in a wide variety of ways. Moral rules are therefore rules of thumb, open to exceptions whenever persuasive arguments for making them are provided.

Caroline Franks Davis here undertakes an assessment of the value of religious experiences as evidence for religious beliefs. She distinguishes this question from that of the veridical character of particular experiences or their value for the person undergoing them or his community. She attends both to the phenomenological variety of religious experiences and the variety of cultural settings in which they take place. She concludes that religious experience can form an important part of the case for what she calls "broad theism"--the belief that there is a "true self" behind the phenomenal ego and that the highest good for a human being is union or harmonious relation with this holy and eternal ultimate reality. Broad theism, she argues, can explain the two most persuasive forms of religious experience--the numinous and the mystical--though it is not enough to ground a living religion.

Many of us want to say that there is an absolute—or at least a virtually absolute—prohibition on torturing people. But we live in a world in which firm moral restraints of all sorts are hard to defend. Neither contemporary conventional morality, nor any of the available moral theories, provides adequate support for the deliverances of the “wisdom of repugnance” in this area. Nor do they support casuistry capable of distinguishing torture from (sometimes legitimate) forms of rough treatment. I here make some suggestions concerningthe improvement of this situation.

It is commonplace that negative duties are more stringent than positive duties. it is also commonplace that this distinction requires defense, in particular against those who regard it as a mere apology for the privileges of the wealthy and secure. i conclude, though real, the distinction between negative and positive duties is not as deep as some philosophers have supposed--that it makes best sense in terms of a deeper distinction between the intended and the foreseen consequences of our actions.