School
Natural law
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Norms are neither true nor false, so there is no logic of obligation, only a logic about obligations
This puzzle has bothered me since I read Kelsen as a law student in Lahore. Logic, as usually understood, is about relations between things that can be true or false: if the premises are true, the conclusion must be. But norms ("you…
Started by Hamza Qureshi4 replies -
Double effect is a genuine moral distinction, not a lawyer’s trick for doing harm with clean hands
Every year at least one of my students arrives having read online that the doctrine of double effect is Catholic casuistry: a way to do what you want and say you did not intend it. I want to defend it as a…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu6 replies -
Anscombe was right: no emergency makes it permissible to target civilians deliberately
Here is the hardest case for the principle of discrimination. Suppose deliberately attacking a civilian population would end a war years early and save more lives than it costs, including more civilian lives. The arithmetic points one way. Elizabeth Anscombe's answer was…
Started by Aoife Kilbride6 replies -
Bentham was right that natural rights are nonsense, but wrong about why
Bentham's attack on the French Declaration of Rights, usually published as Anarchical Fallacies, contains the most quoted insult in political philosophy: natural rights are simple nonsense, and natural and imprescriptible rights are "nonsense upon stilts". His reason: a right is the creature…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
Natural law is a form of ethical naturalism, and it needs no ontological naturalism
I keep meeting a confusion, in students and in some books: that "naturalism" is one view, and that a Catholic, by definition, can't be a naturalist. My thesis: natural law theory is a form of ethical naturalism, because it holds that moral…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu4 replies -
Robert Adams’s modified divine command theory answers the ‘God could command cruelty’ objection
The standing objection to divine command theory is that if obligation depends on God's will as such, the content of morality could in principle have been anything. Had God commanded gratuitous cruelty, cruelty would have been obligatory. William of Ockham is often…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies