The moral animal: virtue, vice, and human nature.

In Leo Tolstoy's famous novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a rich and meaningful inner life is sacrificed in pursuit of material rewards and social status. How can we cultivate something intrinsic that transcends our worldly accomplishments? Assuming that a basic model or map of human nature is needed to navigate the road to the good life, what desires, tendencies, and aversions constitute our core nature? How has our evolutionary history shaped our moral impulses? Are we inherently good or fundamentally flawed? Steve Paulson, executive producer and host of To the Best of Our Knowledge, moderated a discussion with philosopher Christian Miller, neuroscientist Heather Berlin, and historian of science Michael Shermer to examine our moral ecology and its influence on our underlying assumptions about human nature.

In defense of a supernatural foundation to morality: reply to Shermer.

In my original paper, I claimed that our moral obligations are real, objective, and grounded in the supernatural. In particular, I endorsed the claim that God's will is the basis or source of our moral obligations, where "God" is to be understood as the theistic being who is omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent, who created the universe, and who is still actively involved in the universe after creating it. In his critical article, Michael Shermer has raised a number of important challenges to my view. Here I try to defend the position and respond to at least his most serious objections.

Morality is real, objective, and supernatural.

The goal of this paper is to briefly introduce and defend the idea that God is the source of our moral obligations. In contrast to Michael Shermer's paper, which defends a naturalistic position about the foundations of morality, this approach is explicitly supernaturalistic. The paper begins by defining how "God" will be understood, and then spells out some of the details of how, on the proposed view, moral obligations are to depend upon God. The third section briefly reviews some of the leading arguments for this view, before the paper concludes with a discussion of the Euthyphro dilemma.

On Shermer on morality.

This is my critical commentary on Michael Shermer's paper "Morality is real, objective, and natural." Shermer and I agree that morality is both real and objective. Here I raise serious reservations about both Shermer's account of where morality comes from and his account of what morality tells us to do. His approach to the foundations of morality would allow some very disturbing behaviors to count as moral, and his approach to what morality says does not provide the action guidance we need from a moral theory.