In December we were told that Matt’s article “Tooley, Plantinga and the Deontological Problem of Evil”  had passed peer review and would be published in Philosophia Christi.  Issue, 13: 2  is  now out and if you look at the contents page you’ll see Matt’s article has now been published.

The abstract to Matt’s article is as follows:

This article criticises the deontological argument from evil proposed by Michael Tooley  in The Knowledge of God. I sketch Tooley’s distinction between deontological and axiological arguments from evil. Tooley rejects the axiological version because it rests  on “controversial ethical claims”, claims that are “likely to be rejected by many theists” and formulates a deontological version in its place. I argue that Alvin Plantinga’s criticism of the moral premises of this argument can be reformulated by appealing to a divine command theory of ethics. So reformulated, I argue that Tooley’s argument relies on controversial moral assumptions that many theists reject. I defend this response against potential criticisms found in the writings of Linda Zagzebski,  Tooley’s debate with William Lane Craig, and Peter Van Inwagen.

Much of the focus of this issue is the topic of God and Abstract Objects. However, fortuitously, our good friend and fellow Kiwi, Glenn Peoples from Say Hello to My Little Friend,  has also been published in the same issue of Philosophia Christi immediately after Matt. His abstract is below:

Of the objections to divine command ethics that still circulate in the literature, the epistemological objection is one of the two most common (the other being the objection from abhorrent commands). If morality is based on divine commands, the objection goes, then those who do not believe in God cannot know what is right or wrong. In this paper I explain the way in which this objection has been answered in the past (especially by Philip Quinn and Robert Adams) and I then look at a new attempt by Wes Morriston to resurrect and re-state the epistemological objection.  I explain the way in which this objection succumbs to responses that have already been made in the literature and is not new at all in spite of appearances, and I explain how it misconstrues the social nature of obligation in Robert Adams’ account of divine commands. In giving this explanation I flesh out the potentially difficult notion of a “sign” as an epistemic indicator of moral duty, and I argue that all the epistemological objections to divine command ethics this far fail because they have an underdeveloped concept of a “sign” as a central component of a command.

Perhaps the theme for this issue should have been God, Abstract Objects and Divine Command ethics Down Under?

Tags:   Divine Command Theory · Glenn Peoples · Philosophia Christi · Publication · Published1 Comment