W. P. Franks: Explaining evil: four views
- PDF / 422,174 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 107 Downloads / 197 Views
W. P. Franks: Explaining evil: four views Bloomsbury Academic, London, 180 pp, $27.95 (paper) Jeffrey J. Jordan1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Besides monographs (whether single-authored or co-authored) and anthologies, a third genre exists in academic publishing: the debate book. Sometimes these debate books feature two authors in debate, often with alternating chapters. More often, it seems, are debate books with four authors, each assigned a chapter in which one of the four presents a case, which the others analyze and critique, and ends with the featured author replying to those critiques. Explaining Evil: Four Views sits squarely within the debate book genre. This volume focuses on the nature of morality and the origin of human wrongdoing, with two authors (Richard Brian Davis, Paul Helm) writing from the theistic perspective (specifically, Christian). Davis presents a theistic perspective emphasizing incompatibilist libertarianism. Helm, a compatibilist theistic view. Both Davis and Helm are moral realists. The other two contributors write from an atheistic perspective (Michael Ruse and Erik Wielenberg). Ruse presents a naturalistic deflation of morality, while Wielenberg seeks to argue for a robust moral realism. The book has a nine-page introduction written by the editor, and then four chapters, running in length of 33 pages to 38 pages, with one of the four contributors as the featured author. The book ends with a four-page list of recommended readings, a bibliography, and an index. The respective chapters provide useful summaries of a theistic approach to morality (whether from a compatibilist viewpoint or incompatibilist); and two non-theistic views. One is a purely naturalistic worldview in which morality lacks the deep structure that commonsense assumes it has. The other is a G.E. Moore-like view of morality in which there are moral facts, none of which are reducible to, or identical with, or constituted by natural facts. One liability of the debate book genre is that as the number of participants increases, the fewer pages each has to develop his or her case. Depth is lost to diversity. The essays in this volume are each interesting, well done, and suggestive. Each is, however, more of a summary of a position, rather than a detailed presentation in which there is space to address in depth various objections and consequences. * Jeffrey J. Jordan [email protected] 1
University of Delaware, Newark, US
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
International Journal for Philosophy of Religion
Given our own limitations of space, let us focus on two of the four views. Taking the last view to be our focus first, let’s explore Wielenberg’s fascinating view that morality is atheistic yet non-naturalistic. Much of this chapter is a condensed summary of his 2014 book, Robust Ethics. Wielenberg seeks to construct an atheistic account of realist morality in which there are moral facts but no deity. He seeks a kind of moral Platonism in which there are objective (independent of human judgment), substantive, moral reasons for
Data Loading...
