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Ethics Tag

11 Aug

Joshua Kellard, Outreach Coordinator at Christian Heritage, continues our series on the University.  Discussions of the mission of the University are always ethical in character: they are concerned with how we ought to live. Specifically, they are concerned with what we ought to do, and why, in the context of higher education. What are the proper goals of the University? What is it for?  The Magna Charta Universitatum documents claim that the University has a universal and rational mission. But if we wish to maintain this, we will need an ethical framework which can justify the University’s activities, showing them to be good. But the fact remains that not every worldview is able to ground the University’s mission in moral reality. In the last post, we saw that secular humanism, committed to the idea of an uncaused and amoral universe, struggles to ground any moral values which are universally valid. It is just not clear how the humanist can move from a description of things that are, to a prescription of how things ought to be. If human beings are the source of all moral values, then ethics will be as changeable and relative as we are. One implication of this worldview-enforced...

19 Sep

Barbarism rarely reveals a bare face. It finds room in our hearts under the generous cover of  ‘modern values’, it spreads with the aid of euphemisms and half-truths, and it covers its tracks with the conscience-numbing virtue of non-judgementalism. But barbarism is with us: quiet, determined, and just occasionally splashed across the opinion pages of national newspapers.   I’m referring here to Rebecca Reid’s defence of the killing of unborn children for any reason whatsoever in the Telegraph last month. The background was the UK Government’s unprecedented move to allow women to obtain pills which would kill their unborn child without the need for an in-person medical consultation. The ‘pills-by-post’ scheme enables women to obtain mifepristone and misoprostol, the two chemical agents used in so-called medical abortions, and to self-administer them at home if they are less than 10 weeks pregnant.  In her article, Reid responded to news that Christian Concern had hired actors to make ‘mystery shopper’ type calls to abortion providers Marie Stopes and Bpas in order to gauge the kinds of reasons for which women were being sent the means to abort. The callers used false names, dates of birth and gestational periods and were, without exception, able to obtain...