An Equities Sensitive Defense for the Battered Woman Who Kills

This is a draft of a paper, many years old, arguing that victims of continuing abuse should sometimes benefit from a readjustment of the reasonableness elements when tried for killing (or feloniously assaulting) their abusers.

Intrinsic Value of an Eternal God – Nihilism, Perfectionism, Weird Deities, and Guilty Pleasures

The thesis for this piece is that it would be good for there to be an eternal God. This will not seem controversial enough to merit cloudspace for most believers, and unbelievers may think it equal in interest to how many angels could dance on the head of a pin if angels there were. The question of the intrinsic value of eternal persons is, admittedly, largely a conceptual etude. It is, however, I think of some interest that the proposition can be established with relatively little machinery. It is, in fact, a fairly easy theorem of intrinsic value theory, and depends on almost nothing in the way of theology. For example it ignores any good thing that God might do for human beings.

Devil Worship and Theories of Reference

The Yazidi, recent targets of genocide in its most atrocious form, have sometimes been accused of devil worship by fundamentalist Christians and Muslims. Of course forced conversion and murder are not be any less moral enormities if their targets are devil worshipers than if they are Episcopalians. A libelous accusation of devil worship is, however, something religious people of most persuasions find at least offensive, and the Yazidi are no exception.

Because a little modestly technical philosophy is helpful in analyzing the accusation of devil worship, and is illustrative of turns of argument applicable in many other settings, I am going to take a closer look at the issue than its plausibility and the moral standing of the accusers warrant.

Close Your Eyes and See Sense Data?

I will not positively insist that we “see” anything when we close our eyes in a not bright room. If you prefer to say that we have a “visual sensations” or something of the sort, that is fine with me. There is at least something going on that permits us to make such descriptions as “there was a greenish blob that drifted down and left above a small, yellowish comma shaped patch.” Nowadays these experiences, or perhaps more accurately the content of these experiences, are called, by philosophers, “qualia.” Russell, G.E. Moore and others in the early 20^th century would have called them “sense data.”