Julian Kanu

An essential part of worshiping God in many traditions is offering praise to God. Analysis of what praising God amounts to, and whether God is worthy of our praise, is thus of philosophical interest. In this paper, I argue that surprisingly God is not praiseworthy for any of his particular actions; rather, we praise God for his morally good character. This involves a crucial distinction between praising someone for doing something and praising someone for their character. I argue that God cannot be praised for any of his actions because that requires that God have worse, or bad, alternatives, which are not available to him because of his perfect, or all-good, nature. Then, I give three reasons to support the claim that some of our ordinary expressions of praise for God really function as a type of character praise. Thus, in these cases, we are not praising God for any particular action, but rather we are acknowledging God’s good nature. Finally, I consider the following objections: (1) it is absurd to think someone is praiseworthy for their character if they have not done any praiseworthy actions, (2) Frankfurt-style reasoning may explain how we praise God even if he lacks alternatives, and (3) some of the expressions of praise to God involve actions, so my proposed account is implausible.

A pro-life view can be called harm-theoretic if it claims abortion is impermissible because of the harm caused to the fetus. These positions are important in the abortion discussion because they allow pro-lifers to argue abortion is impermissible without claiming the fetus is a moral person. A major problem with harm-theoretic abortion views is that they fall victim to the contraception reductio. The contraception reductio was originally posed toward the Future like Ours argument for the impermissibility of abortion, but I show it is a problem for harm-theoretic positions in general. I argue that the currently proposed solutions aimed at solving the contraception reductio are unsatisfactory because they commit you to unnecessary controversial metaphysical positions, such as animalism and denying mereological universalism. Then, I give a new solution to the contraception reductio that avoids those metaphysical commitments. The main conclusion is that harm-theoretic views can avoid the contraception reductio by accepting a biological account of the harm of death.

An essential part of worshiping God in many traditions is offering praise to God. Analysis of what praising God amounts to, and whether God is worthy of our praise, is thus of philosophical interest. In this paper, I argue that surprisingly God is not praiseworthy for any of his particular actions; rather, we praise God for his morally good character. This involves a crucial distinction between praising someone for doing something and praising someone for their character. I argue that God cannot be praised for any of his actions because that requires that God have worse, or bad, alternatives, which are not available to him because of his perfect, or all-good, nature. Then, I give three reasons to support the claim that some of our ordinary expressions of praise for God really function as a type of character praise. Thus, in these cases, we are not praising God for any particular action, but rather we are acknowledging God’s good nature. Finally, I consider the following objections: (1) it is absurd to think someone is praiseworthy for their character if they have not done any praiseworthy actions, (2) Frankfurt-style reasoning may explain how we praise God even if he lacks alternatives, and (3) some of the expressions of praise to God involve actions, so my proposed account is implausible.

This paper presents natural deduction systems for modal (sub)intuitionistic logics without a monotonic valuation function and establishes soundness and completeness results for the systems consid- ered. Our semantic framework is based on birelational models, equipped with two accessibility relations: one corresponding to the modal acces- sibility relation of normal modal logics, and the other corresponding to the accessibility relation in intuitionistic Kripke semantics. Our main strategy will be to add a ♦, a ♢ of the usual intuitionistic if-then connective, to prove completeness. We first start with the minimal subintuitionistic modal logic SIK, and then characterize the modal extensions corresponding to T, D, 4, and 5.