Alexander Pruss's Blog

Suppose that Alice wronged Bob, repented, and God forgave Alice for it. Bob, however, withholds his forgiveness. First, it is interesting to...

Socrates famously held that a wrongdoer harms themselves more than they harm their victim. This is a correct rule of thumb, but I doubt tha...

In recent posts I’ve been exploring the idea that wrongdoing imposes on us a debt of a normative burden. This yields this argument: Whene...

If I have done you a serious wrong, I bear a burden . I can be relieved of that burder by forgiveness. What is the burden and what is the re...

Consider this Harm Principle: Without a relevant connection to actual, intended or risked harm, there is no wrongdoing. Now suppose Carl...

In my previous post , I said that murder is a counterexample to the privation theory of evil. For a murder is an evil, but a murder is not a...

It is very plausible that God can forgive wrongs we do to him. But a very difficult question which is rarely discussed by philosophers of re...

I rarely take myself to know that someone is culpable for some particular wrongdoing. There are three main groups of exception: my own wro...

Here’s an interesting double-counting problem for wrongdoing. Alice stands to inherit a lot of money from a rich uncle in Australia. Bob thi...

The following form of argument has some initial plausibility: Ordinarily, action type A is no better than action type B . So, if there i...

Here’s an interesting thing. An act doesn’t necessarily become any more wrong for wronging someone. Alice and Bob respectively come across ...

It is a common intuition, especially among Christians, that attempts at immoral actions—say, attempted murder or attempted adultery—are just...

Torturing someone is gravely wrong because it causes grave harm to the victim, and the wickedness evinced in the act is typically proportion...

Some types of wrongdoing vary in degree of seriousness from minor to grave. Stealing a dollar from a billionaire is trivially wrong while st...

Case 1: Petr shoots and kills Anna while hiking, thinking that Anna is a dangerous bear (she was wearing a fur coat). Case 2: Ivan the NKVD ...

It is tempting to use harm to self as an explanation for the wrongness of various things. Kant infamously did this in trying to explain why ...

I accept the following two claims: Every free action is done for a reason. If an action is obligatory, then I have on balance r...

Each of the following propositions is controversial: It is possible to act wrongly without wronging any person. It is possible ...

One of the interesting questions about Christian moral philosophy is how moral life differs if Christianity is correct from how it...