MORALITY AND NATURE: EVOLUTIONARY CHALLENGES TO CHRISTIAN ETHICS

Law, liberty, and Christian morality

There is a long liberal political tradition of marshalling arguments aimed at convincing Christians that distinctively Christian reasons for issuing coercive laws are not sufficient to justify those laws. In the first part of this paper I argue that the two most popular of these arguments, attributable to Locke, will not reliably convince committed biblical Christians, nor, probably, should the...

Teleology, Utilitarianism, and Christian Ethics

T AIM of this essay is to clarify the models of moral thinking and doing called teleology and deontology, to gain understanding of utilitarianism as a subcategory of the former, and to explore the relation both to utilitarianism and to teleology in general of certain Christian "consequentialist" modes of moral argument. This purpose arises out of a general and considerable unclarity in recent e...

Moral argument and Christian ethics.

Morality and ethics without religion

The editorial in question repeatedly suggests that morals are derived from religious principles. This is a common misconception. Indeed, amoral and unethical behavior is often supported by religion; historical and contemporary examples are support for slavery and oppression of women and homosexuals. Moreover, numerous secular, nonreligious individuals and organizations (such as Doctors Without ...

Ethics education and physician morality.

Medical ethics education remains an important venue of moral education. In spite of the intensity of these efforts, the desired outcomes of medical ethics education remain obscure, undefined and largely untested. In the first part of this study, the goals of medical ethics are operationalized along cognitive, behavioral and attitudinal dimensions. This includes a written moral judgment test, a ...