In almost every talk I give on divine command theory someone in the audience inevitably will interpret me as saying that atheists can’t believe in moral requirements and will cite the fact unbelievers can know what’s right and wrong as a reason to reject the theory. This happens even when I have spent some time […]
Entries Tagged as 'Richard Carrier'
Divine Command Theory and The Masked Man Fallacy
October 8th, 2017 10 Comments
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Epistemology · Paul Kurtz · Richard Carrier · Walter Sinnott-Armstrong · William Lane Crai
Richard Carrier on the Moral Scepticism Objection to Divine Command Theory
October 7th, 2017 13 Comments
In my paper “Is Ethical Naturalism More Plausible than Supernaturalism: A Reply to Walter Sinnott-Armstrong”. I discussed the what I called the “Moral Scepticism objection’ to a Divine command theory (DCT) of ethics. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong had argued as follows: [1] If DCT is true then we cannot know whether an action is wrong unless we know that God has it. [2] We have no […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Epistemology · Richard Carrier
Carrier on infantile moral reasoning: one more time
March 16th, 2017 1 Comment
In a previous post, I discussed Carrier’s defence of “The infantile Objection” to divine a command theory (DCT) of meta-ethics. Some comments he makes in the same paper, suggest a slightly different version of the argument. Seeing I have found this version of the objection relatively common in oral discussions. It is worth having a […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Historical Atrocities · Richard Carrier
Richard Carrier and the “Infantile” objection to God’s command’s
October 27th, 2015 1 Comment
In his article, “Why Traditional Theism Cannot Provide an Adequate Foundation for Morality”, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argued that a “Divine command theory makes morality childish.”[1] In my response to Armstrong, “Is Ethical Naturalism more Plausible than Supernaturalism?”[2] I made two points. First, I addressed a tangential point: that Armstrong’s argument caricatures divine command theory (“DCT”) by tacitly assuming that […]
Tags: Autonomy · Divine Command Theory · God and Morality · Hell · Richard Carrier · Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Richard Carrier and the Abhorrent Commands Objection
October 5th, 2014 4 Comments
In my last post, Richard Carrier and the Arbitrariness Objection, I argued that Richard Carrier’s attempt to defend Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s arbitrariness objection failed. I also argued his defence of this argument is incoherent and engages in special pleading because the arguments he defends apply with equal cogency to his own version of ethical naturalism. When […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · God and Morality · Richard Carrier
Richard Carrier and the Arbitrariness Objection
September 5th, 2014 5 Comments
In, “Is ethical naturalism more plausible than Supernaturalism“, I criticised Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s objection that a divine command theory (DCT) makes morality arbitrary. Armstrong argued: “Let’s assume that God commanded us not to rape. Did God have any reason to command this? If not, his command was arbitrary, and then it can’t make anything morally wrong. On […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · God and Morality · Publication · Richard Carrier
Ethical Supernaturalism is still more Plausible than Naturalism: Carrier’s Preliminary Objections
August 20th, 2014 5 Comments
Last year I had an article Is Ethical Naturalism more plausible than Supernaturalism: A reply to Walter Sinnott Armstrong published in the journal Philo. In the comments section a reader asked me to comment on a response to that article published by classical historian Richard Carrier. This post will be the first of several where I do so. In, Is […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · God and Morality · Publications · Richard Carrier
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
