The Religious Conservative’s False Choice: “Big Brother” Or “Heavenly Father”

February 23, 2011 By 3 Comments

In an e-mail to me, Caroline proposes thought provoking reasons for non-believers to encourage (or at least to not actively discourage) religious beliefs: It would also be nice if people would carry out actions in good conscience of just being decent human beings rather than in fear of reprisal in the afterlife, but as there [...]

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What Can An Atheist Love In People’s Religiosity?

February 15, 2011 By 13 Comments

Earlier today, I argued that atheists can vigorously and outspokenly oppose bad faith-based ideas, values, and behaviors, but still love other aspects of the religiosity of their religious friends (and of religious people in general). I argued that religion can be as central to personal identity formation as sexuality is and that to indiscriminately hate [...]

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Can You Really Love Religious People If You Hate Their Religion?

February 15, 2011 By 15 Comments

Atheists do not exactly claim to “love sinners but hate sins” (if for no other reason than that most, if not all, of us reject the category of “sin” as a meaningful or valuable way to talk about ethical failure). Also, atheists may be more realistic than to think that we really do, or feasibly [...]

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What Is Love? Here’s My Theory.

February 14, 2011 By 2 Comments

This is a renamed repost of July 24, 2009 post called “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count The Ways”: In the first part of this series, I explored the reasons for rejecting “unconditional” love as a candidate for the ideal essence of love since as a concept it is riddled with numerous problems [...]

Filed Under: Applied Ethics, Applied Ethics, Ethics, Ethics, Featured, Love, Love, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, Virtues, Virtues 2 Comments

Moral vs. Non-Moral Values

January 28, 2011 By 2 Comments

In a recent post I distinguished numerous times between moral and non-moral values and between different sorts of intrinsic and instrumental goods.  James Gray asks for clarifications about how I use these terms: First, I don’t know that it matters to call something a “moral value.” Of course, there are instrumental values concerning morally neutral [...]

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Pleasure And Pain As Intrinsic Instrumental Goods

January 27, 2011 By 2 Comments

In recent posts I have been arguing that there is one sense of the word “good” which can be analyzed in terms of facts and that this is the kind of “goodness” which we can consider a real part of the world.  This real, intrinsic, factual sense of goodness is its meaning as “effectiveness”. We [...]

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What Is Happiness And Why Is It Good?

January 24, 2011 By 2 Comments

In this post, I explore the meanings and worths of two phenomena recognized by our language as  ”happiness”, in reply to remarks by James Gray on my most recent post.  For a little background for those joining late and who would like to catch up: I have been arguing in several posts now that goodness factually means [...]

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Effectiveness Is The Primary Goal In Itself, Not Merely A Means

January 24, 2011 By 17 Comments

In a recent post I argued that goodness, objectively speaking, means effectiveness.  Of course we use the word “good” for numerous purposes, to express that we find something pleasant, desirable, useful, advantageous to our interests, etc.  But I want to argue that when it comes to the facts of reality, goodness has only this one essential [...]

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Grounding Objective Value Independent Of Human Interests And Moralities

January 23, 2011 By 5 Comments

In my most recent philosophical post, I have finally explained one of the most fundamental premises necessary for explaining and justifying my overall views on ethics.  I explained my view that goodness objectively means effectiveness and that all further true ideas of “good” should be understood only as derivative from the basic good of effectiveness.  Also [...]

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Deriving An Atheistic, Naturalistic, Realist Account Of Morality

January 20, 2011 By 3 Comments

Tom Gilson thinks that theism accounts for moral realism better than atheism does.  My reasons for rejecting that view are here (though I am interested in tailoring a future post specifically to Gilson’s particular way of arguing for a theist basis for moral realism). For now, however, rather than counter Gilson’s positive claims for theism’s [...]

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