Alexander Pruss's Blog

Aristotle writes at times as if the fact that something is non-instrumentally good for one makes it a greater good than merely instrumental ...

What am I? A herring-eater, a husband, a badminton player, a philosopher, a father, a Canadian, a six-footer and a human are all correct ans...

There is a way to connect the right and wrong with the good and bad: An action is right (respectively, wrong) if and only if it is noninst...

Consider the following thesis that both Kantians, utilitarians and New Natural Law thinkers will agree on: All facts about rightness and w...

According to the guise of the good thesis, one always acts for the sake of an apparent good. There is a weaker and a stronger version of thi...

In my previous post I cast doubt on reducing moral reasons to goods. What about the other direction? Can we reduce goods to reasons? The ...

Here is one way to generate a great chain of agency: y is a greater agent than x if for every major type of good that x pursues, y pursu...

In the previous two posts ( here and here ) I offered interpretations or remixes of Aquinas’s Fourth and Fifth ways read as ways of showing...

I’m playing with a reading—or perhaps remix—of Aquinas’ Fourth and Fifth Ways as giving a theistic solution to a problem that non-theistic A...

People sometimes wonder, perhaps in connection with the problem of evil, whether there is in total more good than evil in the world. The con...

Should a state promote supernatural goods like salvation? Here is a plausible argument, assuming the existence of supernatural goods: Supe...

There is an intrinsic value to standing against evil . One way to do that is to intentionally act to reduce the evil. But that’s not the onl...

Here’s a curious fact: It is one thing to pursue something because it is a non-instrumental good and another to pursue it as a non-instrume...

One of the earliest and most important discoveries in Western philosophy was: Doing the right thing is sometimes bad for you (in non-moral...

The following six premises are logically incompatible: Pain is intrinsically bad. Pain is a quale. Qualia are real entities. All real e...

Here is a simple reductive account of right and wrong that now seems to me to be obviously correct: An action is right if and only if it i...

Peter van Inwagen argues that because a little less evil would always serve God’s ends just as well, there is no minimum to the amount of ev...

Thanks to emails with a presentist-inclining graduate student, I have come to realize that on eternalism there seems to be a really interest...

I’m hereby instituting a game: the breathing game. My score in the game ranges from 0 to 10. I get 0 points if I hold my breath for a minute...

A men's lacrosse team has twice as many members as a basketball team. But that fact does not contribute to making a men's lacrosse t...