John E. Hare

Scotus on Morality and Nature

This article is part of a larger project defending a version of divine command theory in ethics. What I am interested in from Scotus is that he combines such a theory with a view that grounds ethics in nature, especially human nature. In order to understand this combination, we need to start with his view of the two affections. Scotus takes from Anselm the idea that humans have in their will two basic affections (or intellectual appetites), what he calls the affection for advantage ( affectio commodi ) and the affection for justice ( affectio justitiae ). All acts of the will, on this view, stem from one affection or the other. Behind Anselm is Augustines insistence, which Scotus alre refers to frequently, that God is to be enjoyed and not used (even though entering into Gods love is our greatest happiness), and everything else is to be used and not enjoyed.

The Limits of Paternalism in Emergency Care

A forty-year-old man who had been stabbed in the chest was brought to the emergency room of a metropolitan hospital by the police. He was bleeding and his blood pressure was low. A physician applied manual pressure to the wound and administered fluid intravenously to restore blood volume. When the pressure was released to allow a surgeon to inspect the wound, bleeding immediately resumed, and pressure was reapplied. The patient was told that an artery had been cut and that he needed an immediate, potentially life-saving operation to tie the bleeding vessel and to determine whether there was a more serious, underlying injury. To everyones surprise, the patient would not consent to the operation. Holding up his left hand to show three flexed and immobile fingers, he said that ten years earlier he had agreed, against his better judgment, to an operation on his hand. Now the hand was useless. He did not be-

Evolutionary Theory and Theological Ethics

This paper is about the problematic interface between evolutionary scientists’ talk about ethics and current work in philosophy and theology. The paper proceeds by taking four main figures from four different disciplines. The four disciplines are neurophysiology, cognitive psychology, primatology and game theory, and the four figures are Joshua Greene, Mark Hauser, Frans de Waal and Ken Binmore. The paper relates the views of each of these figures to recent work in philosophical and theological ethics.

A Kantian Response to Jean Porter

Jean Porter’s natural law theory and my divine command theory differ less than one might expect. Two differences that remain are that, with respect to deductivism, the view that we can deduce our moral obligations from human nature, we agree that human nature is insufficiently specific, but she does not acknowledge the place of revealed divine law in later scholasticism or the role for what Scotus calls ‘dispensations’. With respect to eudaimonism, the view that our choices are for the sake of happiness, I do not agree that life presents itself to us integrated under the conception of a single way of life. Even in Aquinas there is a tension between his eudaimonism and his view that the love of God for God’s own sake is the distinctive mark of charity, and that charity toward the neighbor requires us to promote the neighbor’s good for the neighbor’s sake and not our own.

Philosophical Comments on Ahmed’s Proposal

Arif Ahmed’s paper claims moral neutrality for game theory. This is not true, however, of much of classical game theory, for example Ken Binmore’s Game Theory and the Social Contract (1994). The field has changed comparatively recently. With respect to his own version, he claims that evolutionary explanation of cooperation is incompatible with theism, but this is because he thinks just about anything is compatible with it. It is important to see that this critique is the same as the logical positivists’ critique in the 1950s, for example in Antony Flew’s parable of the invisible gardener. The logical positivists thought that a statement could only be meaningful if it is either a tautology or empirically verifiable or falsifiable. But a claim that God exists is not subject to empirical confirmation, because God is not that kind of being. To dismiss the claim on that basis is just to beg the question.