Mark C. Murphy

In addressing objections to the theological voluntarist program, the consensus response by defenders of theological voluntarism has been to affirm a restricted theological voluntarism on which some, but not all, important normative statuses are to be explained by immediate appeal to the divine will. The aim of this article is to assess the merits and demerits of this restricted view. While affirming the restricted view does free theological voluntarism from certain objections, it comes at the cost of committing the theological voluntarist to the view that no theses about the divine nature itself could alone be sufficient to motivate a theological voluntarist thesis about any normative status. And when we examine the case for a theological voluntarist account of any particular normative status – say, rightness, or obligatoriness – there are severe difficulties with that case as it stands. It is thus unclear whether the theological voluntarist program of providing good reasons to affirm a voluntarist explanation of non‐trivially‐theistic normative statuses has borne fruit

Tacit consent theories of political obligation have fallen into disfavor. The difficulties that plague such accounts have been well-known since Hume's "Of the Original Contract"1 and have recently been forcefully reformulated by M. B. E. Smith, A. John Simmons, and Joseph Raz.2 In this article, though, I shall argue that Hobbes' version of the argument from tacit consent escapes the criticisms leveled by Hume, Smith, Simmons, and Raz against tacit consent theories as a class. Crucial to my defense of this claim will be a certain interpretation of Hobbes' account of covenants, an account quite different than that presupposed by the opponents of the argument from tacit consent

This article examines morality and divine authority in the context of the question of whether God – that is, God's existence, nature, or activity – explains morality. It begins with some clarifying remarks about the meaning of ‘God’, ‘morality’, and ‘explains’. The article then evaluates the Theistic Explanation of Morality: for every moral fact, there is some fact about God that explains it. Defences of this thesis might appeal to rather different sorts of relationship between moral and theistic facts, and some of those differences are discussed.

In this article I consider the respective merits of three interpretations of divine command theory. On DCT1, S’s being morally obligated to φ depends on God’s command that S φ; on DCT2, that moral obligation depends on God’s willing that S be morally obligated to φ; on DCT3, that moral obligation depends on God’s willing that S φ. I argue that the positive reasons that have been brought forward in favor of DCT1 have implications theists would find disturbing and that the positive reasons brought forward in favor of DCT2 support only a weak formulation of DCT2 that is indistinguishable from other theistic moral theories. DCT3 is, however, a distinctive theory that theists have strong reasons to affirm.

The contribution to contemporary philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre is enormous. His writings on ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of the social sciences and the history of philosophy have established him as one of the philosophical giants of the last fifty years. His best-known book, After Virtue, spurred the profound revival of virtue ethics. Moreover, MacIntyre, unlike so many of his contemporaries, has exerted a deep influence beyond the bourns of academic philosophy. This volume focuses on the major themes of MacIntyre's work with critical expositions of MacIntyre's views on the history of philosophy, the role of tradition in philosophical inquiry, the philosophy of the social sciences, moral philosophy, political theory, and his critique of the assumptions and institutions of modernity. Written by a distinguished team of philosophers, this volume will have a wide appeal outside philosophy to students in the social sciences, law, theology, and political theory.

Michael J. Almeida offers two criticisms of the argument of my ‘A trilemma for divine command theory’. The first criticism is that I mistakenly assume the validity of the following inference pattern: property A is identical to property B; property B supervenes on property C; therefore, property A supervenes on property C. The second criticism is that I have misinterpreted the moral-supervenience thesis upon which I rely in making this argument. The first of Almeida's criticisms is completely untenable. The second of his criticisms casts doubt on my argument, a doubt that I can mitigate but not entirely dispel. (Published Online August 11 2004).

The penal substitution account of the Atonement fails for conceptual reasons: punishment is expressive action, condemning the party punished, and so is not transferable from a guilty to an innocent party. But there is a relative to the penal substitution view, the vicarious punishment account, that is neither conceptually nor morally objectionable. On this view, the guilty person’s punishment consists in the suffering of an innocent to whom he or she bears a special relationship. Sinful humanity is punished through the inglorious death of Jesus Christ; ill-desert is thus requited, and an obstacle to unity with God is overcome.

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 arguments for the plausibility of that principle.

The Philosophy of Law is a broad-reaching text that guides readers through the basic analytical and normative issues in the field, highlighting key historical and contemporary thinkers and offering a unified treatment of the various issues in the philosophy of law. Enlivened with numerous, everyday examples to illustrate various concepts of law. Employs the idea of three central commonplaces about law - that law is a social matter, that law is authoritative, and that law is for the common good - to organize seemingly disparate topics and to bring rival views into contention with each other. The first volume in the Fundamentals of Philosophy series, in which leading philosophers explore the fundamental issues and core problems in the major sub-disciplines of philosophy

Natural law theory has been undergoing a revival, especially in political philosophy and jurisprudence. Yet, most fundamentally, natural law theory is not a political theory, but a moral theory, or more accurately a theory of practical rationality. According to the natural law account of practical rationality, the basic reasons for actions are basic goods that are grounded in the nature of human beings. Practical rationality aims to identify and characterize reasons for action and to explain how choice between actions worth performing can be appropriately governed by rational standards. These standards are justified by reference to features of the human goods that are the fundamental reasons for action. This book is a defence of a contemporary natural law theory of practical rationality, demonstrating its inherent plausibility and engaging systematically with rival egoist, consequentialist, Kantian and virtue accounts.

It seems to be a widely shared view that any defensible desire-fulfillment theory of welfare must be framed not in terms of what an agent, in fact, desires but rather in terms of what an agent would desire under hypothetical conditions that include improved information. Unfortunately, though, such accounts are subject to serious criticisms. In this paper I show that in the face of these criticisms the best response is to jettison any appeal to idealized information conditions: the considerations put forward in support of the appeal to what would be desired in hypothetical circumstances of improved information do not, in fact, give adequate reason to make that appeal.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Desire and Ethics in Hobbes's Leviathan:A Response to Professor DeighAccording to the "orthodox" interpretation of Hobbes's ethics, the laws of nature are the products of means-end thinking. According to the "definitivist" interpretation recently offered by John Deigh, the laws of nature are generated by reason operating on a definition of "law of nature," where the content of this definition is given by linguistic usage.2 I aim to accomplish two things in this note. First, I want to locate as clearly as possible the point at which the orthodox and definitivist interpretations must disagree. Second, I want to show that once the claim on which these interpretations disagree is made clear, it is the orthodox interpretation that turns out to be the superior.31.Deigh takes as the initial test case for the various interpretations of Hobbes's moral theory the passage in chapter fifteen of Leviathan commonly known as "the reply to the fool." The fool, it will be recalled, argues that the precept that covenants be kept is not a rule of reason; Hobbes argues that the fool's "specious reasoning is neverthelesse [End Page 259] false," for to break a valid covenant is to violate a dictate of reason.4 Deigh summarizes his criticism of the orthodox interpretation of this passage as follows.On [the orthodox] interpretation, the dispute between Hobbes and the Fool concerns the deliverances of reason when reason is exercised in the service of self-interest, that is, when its exercise consists in determining the fittest means to achieving the ends set by egoistic desires. Such an exercise falls outside of the definition of reason that Hobbes gives in chapter five. It exemplifies strategic or means-to-end thinking and not deduction. Indeed, it corresponds to what Hobbes, in chapter three, defines as seeking... Hence, the orthodox interpretation of the laws of nature implies that Hobbes, in expounding the laws of nature, went back on the notion of reason he defined in chapter five. It implicitly attributes a fundamental inconsistency to Hobbes's philosophy.5The laws of nature—among which is the rule requiring the keeping of covenants6 —are held by Hobbes to be precepts of reason.7 Hobbes deems them, collectively, a science,8 by which he means that they are the deliverances of reason that pertain to a specific subject-matter.9 But, argues Deigh, Hobbes understands reason in a very specific way, a way that is distinct from the sort of means-end thinking that Hobbes describes in detail in chapter three and labels "seeking." Thus the orthodox interpretation of Hobbes's moral theory is at odds with Hobbes's own conception of the laws of nature individually as dictates of reason and collectively as the science of the true moral philosophy.It is of course true that the sort of thinking that Hobbes calls "seeking" and the sort of thinking that Hobbes calls "reasoning" are fundamentally different. Seeking takes its origin from experience: we have seen certain events following other events, and we retain a trace of that experience in imagination. Thus when we have some desire, there arises "the Thought of some means we have seen produce the like of that which we ayme at; and from the thought of that, the thought of means to that mean; and so continually, till we come to some beginning within our power."10 Those that are able to engage in this sort of thinking well are prudent,11 and on Hobbes's view, humans with comparable experience will exhibit a comparable degree of prudence.12 And because seeking requires only desire to regulate thought and some experience of events succeeding other events, there is nothing distinctively human about this form of thinking, and indeed Hobbes acknowledges that prudence is common to humans and other animals.13 By contrast, the process that Hobbes calls "reasoning" [End Page 260] is characterized independently of desire. All that is essential to reasoning is that it involves the drawing of consequences that follow from sentences formed from aptly-defined general terms.14 Thus all deliverances of reason are, either explicitly or implicitly, conditional in form: necessarily, if p...

_The Philosophy of Law_ is a broad-reaching text that guides readers through the basic analytical and normative issues in the field, highlighting key historical and contemporary thinkers and offering a unified treatment of the various issues in the philosophy of law. Enlivened with numerous, everyday examples to illustrate various concepts of law. Employs the idea of three central commonplaces about law - that law is a social matter, that law is authoritative, and that law is for the common good - to organize seemingly disparate topics and to bring rival views into contention with each other. The first volume in the _Fundamentals of Philosophy _series, in which leading philosophers explore the fundamental issues and core problems in the major sub-disciplines of philosophy