Alexander R. Pruss

Suppose that one initiates a causal sequence leading to a basically evil state of affairs, but does not intend the evil effect, and the good effects of the action are proportionate to the bad. A state of affairs is a “basic evil” provided it is evil in virtue of itself and not in virtue of its connection with other states of affairs. The classic form of the Principle of Double Effect (PDE) can be taken to state that then the action that initiated the causal sequence is not wrong on account of the basically evil state of affairs it produces. The action might still be wrong for some other reason, say by violating a promise, or causing some other basically evil state of affairs, or being a..

In the first chapter of Romans, Paul tells us that the power and deity of God are evident from what he has created. One reading of this is that there is an argument from the content of what has been created. Thus, the Book of Wisdom, which may well have been the source of Paul’s ideas here, says that “from the greatness and beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen” (13:5, NAB). This is a kind of teleological or design argument. But one might also argue instead from general features of the universe, such as the fact that there is a universe at all, or that there are contingent states of affairs, or that there is motion. Alternately, one might argue from something extremely specific, but where the details do not matter, such as the conjunction of all contingent facts. The general strategy of cosmological arguments is to take a grand feature of the world, and then argue, abstracting from much of its specific content, that the best or only possible explanation is a First Cause, an entity that stands at the head of a causal chain leading to the occurrence of the existential feature. Typically, the grand feature is something the opponent will not challenge. Instead, opponents tend to ask: 1. Does the grand feature actually have an explanation? 2. Can there be an explanation not involving a First Cause? 3. Need the First Cause be God? Recent discussion has particularly focused on the first two questions, and I wish to primarily focus on the first question myself in this talk. But first a few words about progress on the second and third question, in reverse order.

I shall discuss the problem of the definition of lying and the formulation of the duty of truthtelling. I shall argue that the morality of assertion is a special case of the morality of endorsement, and that a criterion of adequacy for an account of lying is that it handles certain cases of dishonest endorsement as well. Standardviews of lying fail to do so. I shall offer an account of the duty of honest endorsement in terms of the intention to avoid falsehood. But, in the end, we may simplyhave reason to go back to the naïve view that lying is saying falsehoods.

Patrick Toner has argued that eternalism, the doctrine that all times are ontologically on par, conflicts with the Catholic view of judgment as based on the state of the soul at death. For, he holds, it is arbitrary that judgment should be based on what happened at some particular time, unless, as presentism holds, that time is the only that really exists. I shall argue that his argument fails because the eternalist can say that judgment is simultaneous with the state of soul that is being judged, and there is nothing arbitrary about judging something at t on the basis of its state at the same time t.

Case 1 (transplant) . You are a surgeon doing an appendectomy on Fred, who is otherwise healthy. You know from his file that, just by chance, his heart, lungs, bone marrow, liver and two kidneys are a perfect match for fifteen patients in your hospital who need various organs or bone marrow, of both of which there is a severe shortage of these organs; Fred, however, has refused to donate anything. If the fifteen patients do not receive the transplants today, they will die. You skillfully use your scalpel to kill Fred in such a way that no one can tell it was no accident, and you use his organs to save fifteen patients. One dead, fifteen innocent people saved.

          Despite the fact that the strength of argument is clearly on the pro-life side—nobody except a handful of academics would question the grave wrongness of abortion were pregnancy never inconvenient—somehow ordinary intelligent people, like our students, often remain unconvinced. There are many reasons for this, of course. For instance, a number of students have had their children aborted while many know others who have had abortions, and one does not want to condemn oneself or oneÂ’s friends. I am a philosopher, however, and so I will be interested in intellectual reasons, even though these subjective psychological ones are almost surely more important. Specifically, I will be interested in the fact that the ordinary person subscribes to a number of erroneous big-picture ethical beliefs, each of which, to a different degree, does something to block access to the pro-life arguments. I will not talk about all such erroneous beliefs and I would be grateful in the discussion for more examples.           I will talk about eight errors I have identified, largely through teaching. For each one, I will identify the error, show how it impacts the pro-life message and explain why it is tempting to most of us —there is, after all, something right about five of the errors. For each of these errors is one that we might ourselves be tempted by on occasion. I will then suggest some ways of refuting the error. In some cases, the mere identification of the error should do the trick, as these erroneous beliefs are often not explicitly identified by our interlocutors. My suggested refutations will not always be phrased in the way in which I would phrase them for didactic effectiveness: in this talk, I am mainly trying to convey ideas.

There is a long tradition of arguments for the existence of God. Early examples include Aristotle’s cosmological argument in Book Lambda of the Metaphysics, arguing that if there is change, there must be at least one unchanging and perfect being that originates all change, while the first chapter of Romans and chapter 13 of the Book of Wisdom insist that “from the greatness and the beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen” (Wis. 13:5, NAB). This tradition continues, and indeed starting in the 1950s, analytic philosophy has seen an impressive resurgence of more and more careful formulations and criticisms of arguments for the existence of God. I shall show how the phenomenon of altruism yields a theistic argument. Some arguments for the existence of God proceed by pure reasoning alone and yield ontological arguments like Anselm’s, while others depend in part either on particular empirical claims (e.g., the argument from miracles or the argument from religious experience), or on general empirical claims, such as that there is motion, consciousness or life. The pattern of the arguments based on general claims is usually simple: (A) There is a general fact about reality, say that there is change or that there are complex organisms. (B) One argues that either the best or the only explanation is to be found in some state of affairs that includes the existence of a God-like being. And so (C) one concludes that a God-like being..

I shall discuss the problem of the definition of lying and the formulation of the duty of truthtelling. I shall argue that the morality of assertion is a special case of the morality of endorsement, and that a criterion of adequacy for an account of lying is that it handles certain cases of dishonest endorsement as well. Standardviews of lying fail to do so. I shall offer an account of the duty of honest endorsement in terms of the intention to avoid falsehood. But, in the end, we may simplyhave reason to go back to the naïve view that lying is saying falsehoods.

As Mark Murphy has recently shown, standard justifications of universal divine authority are insufficient. [1] By “divine authority” I shall mean the doctrine that obedience is morally owed to God by all. God would not give us a command that we did not have a reason to act in accordance with, Murphy argues, but it does not follow that we would be obliged, much less morally obliged, to have the fact of God’s having commanded the action be among our practical reasons for the action. We might, for instance, think that what God has commanded us is prudentially the best policy for us or that it is the best possible evidence for what is on independent grounds morally obligatory.

The production of a number of vaccines involves the use of cell-lines originally derived from fetuses directly aborted in the 1960s and 1970s. Such cell-lines, indeed sometimes the very same ones, are important to on-going research, including at Catholic institutions. The cells currently used are removed by a number of decades and by a significant number of cellular generations from the original cells. Moreover, the original cells extracted from the bodies of the aborted fetuses were transformed to produce the cell lines, since otherwise they would be incapable of the kind of culturing that is required.

Animalism is the view that we are animals and, thus, satisfy the criteria of identity proper to animals. This is highly plausible, for instance because it accepts at face value what appears to be the obvious facts that we are mammals—after all, we have the hair, the inner ear bones and the milk that mammals do—and that being a mammal is a way of being an animal. On the main opposing view, one has to hold that associated with each of us there are two entities: a person and an animal, of which we are only one, and this seems needlessly..

The cosmos is filled with evil that seemingly has no redeeming value. Granted, some evils do lead to greater goods, sometimes goods that could not exist without the evils. Thus, the exercise of courage is a good that requires either an actual evil to stand firm in the face of or the illusion of an evil—and an illusion is a kind of evil, too. But many evils appear to serve no such purpose. Philosophers call an evil that a supremely good God would have insufficient reason to permit to exist a gratuitous evil. A particularly powerful form of the argument from evil against the existence of the God of Western monotheism is, thus, that there..

Assume for simplicity that human mental states are constituted by brain states (if dualism holds, copying of brain states may need to be replaced with copying of soul states). According to psychological continuity theories of personal identity, if the personality and memories of a human person A were copied into the brain of B while the brain of A were destroyed, and no other copies were made, then A would survive in the B-body and would be identical with the post-operative person occupying the B-body. By considering the mechanics of copying in a case where A and B have qualitatively identical brains, I will argue that the conclusion is false, and hence the psychological continuity theories that imply this identity claim are false