Atheist Ethicist

Negligence is thought to be a problem for motive-based (desire-based) moral theories. The reason is because negligence does not spring fro...

Mens rea is a term typically used in criminal law to define the mental elements that one must possess to be guilty of a crime. It is also ...

Error theory is a theory about morality that makes the following claims. (1) Moral statements are statements that make a claim of “obje...

Does desirism require that we weigh all desires equally? Or does it allow a person to give special attention to friends and family? Think ...

When John Stuart Mill defended his version of Utilitarianism , he confronted an objection that the theory failed to account for a number of...

I am letting the discussions in the desirism facebook group guide my writings here to some extent. One of those discussions involves a po...

Brain state theories of value are those theories that declare that the only thing of value is that the brain itself be put in a particular s...

Egoism is a theory that holds that the only thing people do care about (psychological egoism) or the only thing that they should care about ...

The Naturalistic Fallacy stands as an objection to all attempts to reduce moral terms such as "good" to natural terms such as ...

In yesterday's post I argued for the possibility of deriving 'ought' from 'is' by making 'ought' a hypothetical ...

Desirism denies the proposition that you cannot derive "ought" from "is". Actually, given the form of "ought...

In my last post I discussed a simple conflict of desires. In it I drew a contrast between an evaluation made by one of the two agents inside...