-
12The Difference Holiness MakesJournal of Analytic Theology 11 470-488. 2023.Terence Cuneo & Jada Twedt Strabbing, Samuel Fleischacker, Jonathan Rutledge & Jordan Wessling, and Sameer Yadav have generously engaged with the accounts of divine holiness and its implications offered in my _Divine Holiness and Divine Action_ (2021), criticizing its arguments and in some cases offering attractive alternative accounts. Here I respond to some of their criticisms.
-
16Précis of Divine Holiness and Divine ActionJournal of Analytic Theology 11 404-410. 2023.This article is a précis of Mark C. Murphy’s _Divine Holiness and Divine Action_ (Oxford University Press, 2021), which offers an account of God’s holiness and of the difference this view of God’s holiness should make to our understanding of divine action.
-
24The Duty to Obey the Law: Selected Philosophical Readings (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1998.The question 'Why should I obey the law?' introduces a contemporary puzzle that is as old as philosophy itself. The puzzle is especially troublesome if we think of cases in which breaking the law is not otherwise wrongful, and in which the chances of getting caught are negligible. Philosophers from Socrates to H.L.A. Hart have struggled to give reasoned support to the idea that we do have a general moral duty to obey the law but, more recently, the greater number of learned voices has expressed …Read more
-
36Is Goodness Without God Good Enough?: A Debate on Faith, Secularism, and EthicsRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2008.Is Goodness Without God Good Enough contains a lively debate between William Lane Craig and Paul Kurtz on the relationship between God and ethics, followed by seven new essays that both comment on the debate and advance the broader discussion of this important issue. Written in an accessible style by eminent scholars, this book will appeal to students and academics alike.
-
4Innocence Lost: An Examination of Inescapable Moral WrongdoingPhilosophical Books 37 (1): 61-63. 2009.
-
Two unhappy dilemmas for natural law jurisprudenceIn George Duke & Robert P. George (eds.), The Cambridge companion to natural law jurisprudence, Cambridge University Press. 2017.
-
528On the Superiority of Divine Legislation Theory to Divine Command TheoryFaith and Philosophy 39 (3): 346-365. forthcoming.The view that human law can be analyzed in terms of commands was subjected to devastating criticism by H. L. A. Hart in his 1961 The Concept of Law. Two objections that Hart levels against the command theory of law also make serious trouble for divine command theory. Divine command theorists would do well to jettison command as the central concept of their moral theory and, following Hart’s lead, instead appeal to the concept of a rule. Such a successor view—divine legislation theory—has the …Read more
-
63No Creaturely Intrinsic ValuePhilosophia Christi 20 (2): 347-355. 2018.In Robust Ethics, Erik Wielenberg criticizes all theistic ethical theories that explain creaturely value in terms of God on the basis that all such formulations of theistic ethics are committed to the denial of the existence of creaturely intrinsic value. Granting Wielenberg’s claim that such theistic theories are committed to the denial of creaturely intrinsic value, this article considers whether theists should take such a denial to be an objectionable commitment of their views. I argue that t…Read more
-
50An Essay on Divine AuthorityCornell University Press. 2018.In the first book wholly concerned with divine authority, Mark C. Murphy explores the extent of God's rule over created rational beings. The author challenges the view—widely supported by theists and nontheists alike—that if God exists, then humans must be bound by an obligation of obedience to this being. He demonstrates that this view, the "authority thesis," cannot be sustained by any of the arguments routinely advanced on its behalf, including those drawn from perfect being theology, metaeth…Read more
-
Practical Reality (review)Review of Metaphysics 55 (2): 388-389. 2001.The central thought of Jonathan Dancy’s Practical Reality is that any philosophically adequate account of reasons for action has to preserve the sense of the idea that agents can act for good reasons. Though platitudinous enough, this notion embodies the central difficulty faced in the theory of reasons for action: that the notion of a reason for action serves two roles, that of explaining action and that of justifying it. It is sometimes suggested that there is mere ambiguity here: there are mo…Read more
-
377Divine Rationality, Divine Morality, and Divine Love: A Response to JordanEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 10 (4): 203-211. 2018.
-
10Book ReviewsPhilippa Foot,. Natural Goodness.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Pp. 136. $22.00Ethics 113 (2): 410-414. 2003.
-
44God's Own Ethics: Norms of Divine Agency and the Argument From EvilOxford University Press. 2017.Mark C. Murphy addresses the question of how God's ethics differs from human ethics. Murphy suggests that God is not subject to the moral norms to which we humans are subject. This has immediate implications for the argument from evil: we cannot assume that an absolutely perfect being is in any way bound to prevent the evils of this world.
-
16Surrender of Judgment and the Consent Theory of Political AuthorityLaw and Philosophy 16 (2): 115-143. 1997.The aim of this paper is to take the first steps toward providing a refurbished consent theory of political authority, one that rests in part on a reconception of the relationship between the surrender of judgment and the authoritativeness of political institutions. On the standard view, whatever grounds political authority implies that one ought to surrender one's judgment to that of one's political institutions. On the refurbished view, it is the surrender of one's judgment – which can plausib…Read more
-
46FINNIS ON NATURE, REASON, GOD: Mark C. MurphyLegal Theory 13 (3-4): 187-209. 2007.It is often claimed that John Finnis's natural law theory is detachable from the ultimate theistic explanation that he offers in the final chapter of Natural Law and Natural Rights. My aim in this paper is to think through the question of the detachability of Finnis's theistic explanation of the natural law from the remainder of his natural law view, both in Natural Law and Natural Rights and beyond. I argue that Finnis's theistic explanation of the natural law as actually presented can be, with…Read more
-
22The Conscience PrincipleJournal of Philosophical Research 22 387-407. 1997.My aim is to defend the conscience principle: One ought never to act against the dictates of one’s conscience. In the first part of this paper, I explain what I mean by “conscience” and “dictate of conscience,” and I show that the notion that the conscience principle is inherently anti-authoritarian or inherently fanatical is mistaken. In the second part, I argue that the existence of mistaken conscience does not reduce the conscience principle to absurdity. In the third part, I present two argu…Read more
-
9Introduction of the Aquinas Medalist Alasdair MacIntyreProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 84 19-21. 2010.
-
14Functioning and FlourishingProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 73 193-206. 1999.
-
31Natural Law and Moral Philosophy (review)American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71 (4): 635-638. 1997.
-
55Suárez’s “Best Argument” and the Dependence of Morality on GodQuaestiones Disputatae 5 (1): 30-42. 2014.I want to begin by expressing misgivings about a standard way of making out a claim for the dependence of morality on God, misgivings that I do not have about a somewhat less standard way of arguing for this dependence. I will then consider a guiding maxim for how to proceed along this less standard way, a maxim that I draw from Suárez’s account of the relationship between divine activity and the activity of secondary causes. I then sketch one way of conceiving the dependence of morality on God …Read more
-
45Pruss on the Requirement of Universal LoveRoczniki Filozoficzne 63 (3): 21-30. 2015.Throughout his excellent book One Body, Alex Pruss relies upon the view that there is a requirement of universal love: each and every one of us is required to love each and every one of us. Although he often appeals to revealed truth in making arguments for his various theses, he supports the requirement of universal love primarily through a philosophical argument, an argument that I call the “argument from responsiveness to value.” The idea is that all persons bear a sort of nonrelational value…Read more
-
1Philosophical Anarchism and the Possibility of Political ObligationDissertation, University of Notre Dame. 1993.Philosophical anarchism is the thesis that there is no moral requirement to obey the law. I challenge philosophical anarchism by showing that there is a consent account of political obligation, two proponents of which are Hobbes and Aquinas, that manages to avoid criticisms leveled by the philosophical anarchists against consent theories as a class. ;The philosophical anarchists purport to have refuted every plausible account of political obligation; they also claim that no important practical c…Read more
-
7Ln a 1991 interview, Alasdair Maclntyre summarized the history of his own philosophical work as follows: My life as an academic philosopher falls into three parts. The twenty-two years from 1949, when l became a graduate student of philosophy at Manchester University, until 1971 were a period, as it now appears (review)In Alasdair Macintyre, Cambridge University Press. pp. 1. 2003.
-
106 Maclntyre's Political PhilosophyIn Alasdair Macintyre, Cambridge University Press. pp. 152. 2003.
-
13Innocence Lost: An Examination of Inescapable Moral WrongdoingPhilosophical Books 37 (1): 61-63. 1996.