This guest post was submitted by NCT regular commenter, DavidF

Hot off the presses, you can listen to the oral arguments over the Same Sex marriage debate before the Supreme Court. I highly recommend it.

I want to bring up some of the highlights by comparing the competing value structures that the two sides rely on to make their case. So you’re getting a philosophical post and a political post for the price of one. But why the philosophy? Because the moral values both sides bring to the debate rest at the very heart of how they justify their positions. This is a useful tool to get at the bias inherent to each side’s argument.

Consequentialism and Deontology Crash Course

There are two moral systems colliding in this debate: consequentialism and deontology. The conservatives rely mainly on deontological arguments and the liberals rely mainly on consequentialist arguments. What’s the difference?
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The following guest post was submitted to us by DavidF:

Suppose you are sitting at home reading a book. You glance at your watch. It reads 5:23. So you go back to reading now knowing the time. But unbeknownst to you, the battery in your watch died yesterday. By sheer coincidence it stopped at 5:23. It turns out your belief that it’s 5:23 is correct, but only by accident.

This is a Gettier problem. Gettier invented problems like this one to challenge the foundational claims of epistemology, that knowledge is justified true belief. In this scenario, the watch-reader would have a true belief and think it is justified. In reality, the justification is wrong, but the belief is still true. Gettier came up with the first problems in 1963; they vex epistomologists to this day. Gettier’s paradoxes are interesting in their own right. But what happens when you turn an epistemological paradox into a moral one? And what happens when you make it a specifically Mormon one? Let’s see. (more…)

(Love ya, Gary!)

It’s not terribly difficult to guess ahead of time which bloggernacle threads Gary (of NDBF fame) will comment in and roughly what his position will be therein.  This is due to a number of factors:  his overall consistency, the forthright, no-nonsense articulation of his views and (most of all) his staunch adherence to positions which tend to drive intellectuals crazy.  Gary is by no means alone in proudly flaunting these traits as a badge of honor but to me he serves as the perfect poster-boy for all Iron-Rodders if only because he is one of the most patient and likeable of the bunch.

First, I’ll give a little history regarding our interactions in the ‘nacle.  Those who have known me for a while are well aware that I take science fairly seriously and have always had a particular interest in Darwinian evolution.  I’m sure you are also well aware that Gary has always been quite unimpressed by both, to put it mildly.  After many frustrating exchanges between us in which I frequently allowed sarcasm and mockery to take the place of patience and charity I finally thought that I had figured out what Gary’s core argument really was.  (more…)

The following thought experiment can be taken in a number of ways.  For some, it will be a fun little logic game.  For others, it will be yet further proof that philosophers are annoying people who ought to be avoided at parties.  And for others still, it illustrates a broad class of scenarios in which we might actually find ourselves.  So, without further delay…

Suppose we live in a world in which the following things are clearly true:

1.  There are exactly two viable moral theories: duty-based ethics and consequence-based ethics. (It’s not at all important what these theories say, only that they are clearly incompatible with each other.)
2. Whichever moral theory we believe in also dictates what we ought to believe.
3. Duty-based ethics clearly dictates that we ought to believe in consequence-based ethics.
4. Consequence-based ethics clearly dictates that we ought to believe in duty-based ethics.

In such a world, what ought we to believe and how do we go about justifying our beliefs to others?

The subject of loyalty came up over at a recent Bloggernacle Times thread. Jacob J stirred the pot a little by saying the following:

I think loyalty is vastly overrated. In all the cases when loyalty is cited as the motivation for virtuous behavior that same behavior could/should have been motivated by a less problematic virtue like fairmindedness or kindness. In plenty of cases, loyalty is a name for going against your better judgment to do something wrong, covering something up, or sticking up for a person who is in the wrong.

This comment was met with resistance but Jacob is entirely correct. Loyalty is a useful motivational tool to be sure but is hardly a virtue itself.
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Of my wife and my five remaining grandparents, four of them are nearing the end.
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Guest post by Kent White

Mormonism offers a worldview which gives meaning and purpose to my life. I love the gospel I find in the Mormon scriptures and I believe that the way I understand that good news has led me to choose two basic axioms which filter my interpretations of my experiences and desires in this life:

1. I am here to be of service, not to seek to be served.
2. All these things shall give me experience and shall (eventually) be for my good as a result of:
   1. Christ’s power to heal all the pain I feel
   2. Christ’s power to heal all the pain I’ve caused others but can’t fix myself

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If you choose the first answer, please use the comments section to tell us how you fill in the blank.

In a recent post I pointed out that our scriptures unequivocally command us to “spread the wealth”. That commandment is an undeniable fact when it comes to us as individuals. The question is whether government programs designed to spread the wealth are a good idea or not. I don’t claim to have the definitive answer to that question but the argument many participants in that discussion gave against such government programs is clearly bogus. Here it is:

Argument: “Any law that compels or coerces people to do good acts is Satanic” (more…)

Let’s assume for the sake of this post that God exists and that he’s good. In this context, the problem of evil starts to look rather like our complaining about how God does his job. This got me to thinking:

Just what do you think God should be doing? Specifically. (more…)

Not only do I think euthanasia should be decriminalized on libertarian grounds, but I personally don’t consider euthanasia to be immoral in all situations. There are several angles from which this issue is debated, but the ones I am most interested about here are the religious and moral angles. (more…)

I find that many moral dilemmas concocted to show the problems of consequentialism assume the moral reality to be more obvious than it is. In considering moral dilemmas, I often find it useful to imagine how I would react if I learned that God had done the thing being described as immoral. The reason this is useful is that it allows me to strip away all the considerations which are only necessary because of human limitations and imperfections.
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My entire approach to ethics relies upon a distinction between the morality of an agent and the morality of an action. This is not a ground breaking distinction to make, but I have to start small.

1. The morality of people is different than the morality of events.

There is something very different about the person who makes a choice, and the action that results.* The ought of morality only makes sense in relation to a person, who is free to choose one course of action instead of another. And yet, we judge events to be good or bad in a moral sense as well. Because the two are fundamentally different, they must be judged in a fundamentally different way. As Mill pointed out in Utilitarianism, “certainly no known ethical standard decides an action to be good or bad because it is done by a good or a bad man.” People deliberate before a choice is made, and the morality of their choice has to do with what forces win out in that deliberation. An event is simply what happens at a certain place and time, and the morality of events is determined by what happens after the event as a consequence.
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Sometimes people do unimaginable things to other people. When I hear of a horrific crime against an innocent child, my first reaction is sadness. The nightly news makes me cry routinely. My second reaction is anger. My sense of justice cries out for retribution on the criminal. Saddam Hussein provides a good example because his atrocities are already part of the public consciousness to some extent. (more…)

Good and evil can be defined solely in terms of the law of love… Good is whatever leads to greater love and unity in interpersonal relationships… A good act is one that leads to healing a broken relationship or growing in intimacy and meaning in existing relationships… In contrast an evil act is whatever injures or destroys a relationship; it is one that creates alienation. (Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought Vol. 2, 111-112)

Chapter 3 in Blake’s new book is called “The Relationship of Moral Obligation and God in Mormon Thought”. In the chapter he gives overviews of several ethical theories including utilitarianism and Kant’s moral theories. In the end he concludes that a Mormon theory of ethics (which he calls an Agape Theory of Ethics) would overlap lots of other theories to create its own unique model that is made possible largely from the belief that humans are co-eternal with God. (more…)