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2 results

  • 5 - Morality

  • Brian Davies, Fordham University, New York, Michael Ruse, University of Guelph, Ontario
  • Book:
    Taking God Seriously
    Published online:
    29 January 2021
    Print publication:
    18 February 2021, pp 124-154

  • Summary

    Morality is about right and wrong. There is the question of what we should do, substantive ethics, and the question of why we should do what we do, metaethics. There is little if any real difference between Ruse and Davies at the substantive level. At the metaethical level, Ruse takes a subjective view and Davies an objective view, but in important respects there is shared belief. Both ground morality in human nature. Right and wrong at the substantive level is a matter of who and what we are. Kindness to children is a good thing, because that is natural for humans. Hate of the disabled is wrong, because that is unnatural. But whereas Ruse grounds human nature in Darwinian evolutionary theory, and believes that there is no extra appeal to authority, and so is subjective, Davies grounds human nature in God’s loving creation, and hence in this sense is objective. An action is good is because God made us that way, and to do the right thing is to do the (God-created) natural thing.

  • Nature and the Natural

  • Evelyn Fox Keller
  • Journal:
    BioSocieties / Volume 3 / Issue 2 / June 2008
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    01 June 2008, pp. 117-124
    Print publication:
    June 2008

  • As part of my interest in the persistence of unproductive debates about the relative importance of nature and nurture, I focus here on the especially problematic relation between nature and the natural. For if the definition of nature is problematic, its semantic relation to ‘natural’ is even more so. I explore some of the problems that arise from slippage between substantive and normative conceptions of ‘natural’ (inviting collateral slippage between is and ought), from the bifurcatory structure of its negation and from changing assumptions about nature’s domain.