Charles W. Mills developed an argument against ideal theorizing that is inspired by the early writings of Marx and Engels. He argues that the development and refinement of non-ideal theories contributes more to ending oppressive power structures than the development and refinement of ideal theories. For this reason, he concludes that ideal theories play the role of an ideology. In this article, I expose a yet undiagnosed weakness of this argument: I point out that history is rife with examples of (...) political organizations that struggle to identify an effective political practice because they find themselves in a situation of theoretical crisis. Thus, contra Mills, it turns out that ideal theorizing is sometimes a more viable strategy to end oppressive power structures than non-ideal theorizing. So, if we accept the basic premises of Mills’s argument, it turns out that non-ideal theorizing should be classified as an ideology as well. To further corroborate this claim, I point out some problems for Mills’s interpretation of Marx and Engels. If my assessment is right, then it turns out to be unclear if the intellectual authorities that Mills invokes actually lend support to his critique of ideal theorizing. (shrink)

The objection of horrible commands claims that divine command metaethics is doomed to failure because it is committed to the extremely counterintuitive assumption that torture of innocents, rape, and murder would be morally obligatory if God commanded these acts. Morriston, Wielenberg, and Sinnott-Armstrong have argued that formulating this objection in terms of counterpossibles is particularly forceful because it cannot be simply evaded by insisting on God’s necessary perfect moral goodness. I show that divine command metaethics can be defended even against (...) this counterpossible version of the objection of horrible commands because we can explain the truth-value intuitions about the disputed counterpossibles as the result of conversational implicatures. Furthermore, I show that this pragmatics-based defence of divine command metaethics has several advantages over Pruss’s reductio counterargument against the counterpossible version of the objection of horrible commands. (shrink)

Many philosophers of theistic religions claim (1) that there are powerful a posteriori arguments for God’s existence that make it rational to believe that He exists and at the same time maintain (2) that God always has the freedom to do otherwise. In this article, I argue that these two positions are inconsistent because the empirical evidence on which the a posteriori arguments for God’s existence rest can be explained better by positing the existence of a God-like being without the (...) freedom to do otherwise. (shrink)

Stephen Maitzen argues that divine command metaethics must be mistaken because it is committed to the implausible assumption that the sentence ‘God is good’ is a tautology. In this article, I show that a charitable interpretation of R. M. Adams’ version of divine command metaethics is not committed to accept this assumption. I conclude that Maitzen’s objection merely manages to refute a strawman version of divine command metaethics.