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'Covenants, Special Relationships and a Perfectly Loving God'In The God of Covenant, Apollos, Leicester, Uk. 2005.
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242Moral Projection and the Intelligibility of Collective ForgivenessYearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society 7. 2009.ABSTRACT. The paper explores the philosophical intelligibility of contemporary defences of collective political forgiveness against a background of sceptical doubt, both general and particular. Three genera sceptical arguments are examined: one challenges the idea that political collectives exist; another challenges the idea that moral agency can be projected upon political collectives; a final argument challenges the attribution of emotions, especially anger, to collectives. Each of these scept…Read more
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230Political ForgivenessEthics in Brief 14 (2). 2009.The paper attempts to clarify the concept of political forgiveness, distinguishing it from individual forgiveness and illustrating its presence in contemporary politics. It proceeds to explore grounds for criticism of political forgiveness - an authority criticism, a specificity criticism and a temporal distance criticism - and suggests that, although these difficulties can be overcome, they provide serious challenges to putative cases of political forgiveness.
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269Ethics and the Perfect Moral LawTyndale Bulletin 51 (2). 2000.Summary This paper examines contemporary virtue ethics and the claim that Christian ethics is a virtue ethic. Three central theses are identified as being central to virtue ethics: a priority thesis, a perfectionist thesis and a communitarian thesis. It is argued that defences of the priority thesis—it best addresses the moral crisis in our society, it does justice to historical consciousness and it remedies the incompleteness in deontic ethics—are unconvincing. It is argued that virtue and mor…Read more
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181Christ-Shaped Moral Philosophy and the Triviality of 20th Century 'Christian Ethics'.Evangelical Philosophical Society: The Christ - Shaped Philosophy Project. 2014.Christian moral philosophy is a distinctive kind of moral philosophy owing to the special role it assigns to God in Christ. Much contemporary 'Christian ethics' focuses on semantic, modal, conceptual and epistemological issues. This may be helpful but it omits the distinctive focus of Christian moral philosophy: the human condition in a morally ordered universe and the redemptive work of jesus Christ as a response to that predicament. Christian moral philosophers should seek to remedy that negle…Read more
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746The Principle of AnalogyIn Gavin McGrath & C. Stephen Evans (eds.), New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics, Inter-varsity Press. 2006.The Principle of Analogy. ABSTRACT. Sceptics question whether ‘distinctively human’ predicates such as ‘just’, ‘loving’ and ‘powerful’ can intelligibly be attributed to a divine being. If not, then a vicious form of agnosticism seems to threaten orthodox theism. Especially if one assumes a broadly empiricist semantics the challenge, whether formulated in terms of a univocal or an equivocal understanding of predicates, seems to generate intractable philosophical problems. Aquinas’ theory of analo…Read more