Is There a Duty-Generating Special Relationship of Creator to Creature?
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Is There a Duty-Generating Special Relationship of Creator to Creature? Mark Satta 1 Accepted: 11 September 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Mark Murphy has argued that the relationship between a creator and their creatures is not a special relationship that generates new moral obligations for the creator. Murphy’s position is grounded, in part, on his claim that there are no good arguments to the contrary and that the creator-creature relationship (at least in the case of God) is not a relationship between equals. I argue that there are good reasons to think that a creator and creature being equals is not required for such an obligation. I offer an argument for such an obligation based on the moral significance of thrusting upon sentient or rational beings significant, unsought, and wholly new circumstances. More specifically, I argue that it is reasonable to conclude that a creator enters into a duty-generating special relationship with their creatures to promote their creatures’ well-being, when (1) the creator is the voluntary source of the creatures’ wholly new and unconsented to circumstances from which to flourish or languish and (2) it would cost the creator virtually nothing to promote the creatures’ welfare. Keywords Ethics . Special relationship . Obligation . Creator . Creature
Is the creator-creature relationship—i.e., the relationship of X being the creator of Y—a special relationship that provides the creator with duties to promote the welfare of the created? Mark Murphy has recently argued that it is not.1 In this paper, I argue that it is. This paper has two sections. In the first, I examine and respond to Murphy’s arguments against the existence of a duty-generating special relationship between a creator and their creatures. In the second, I offer a positive argument for the conclusion that there is such a duty-generating relationship.
1
Murphy, Mark C. (2017.) God’s Own Ethics: Norms of Divine Agency & the Argument from Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 32–34, 177
* Mark Satta [email protected]
1
Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA
M. Satta
Murphy’s Arguments This section critiques Murphy’s arguments, so it is worth quoting him at some length. Murphy writes: But some want to say that there are new ways of the Anselmian being’s acting defectively that are logically posterior to creation, so that, for example, logically prior to creation there is no more than justifying reason to create, logically posterior to creation, there are requiring reasons to promote the good of the beings thus created. That I have denied. I deny this because we do not have any good arguments for thinking that by creation the Anselmian being makes it the case that new ways of acting will count as defective. The contrast between cases like that of rational willing and entering into a social practice on one hand and that of creation on the other is pretty dramatic. There is an obvious rational relationship that one bears to further actions by intending something, or by participating in a norm-
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