It's no surprise that one shouldn't pray for bad things to happen, for it's always wicked to attempt to bring about evil. But perhaps surprisingly one shouldn't pray for good things either. For if there is an Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omni-Benevolent Deity who intervenes at all in the workings of the world, then He will do whatever is best anyway, and if you pray for what He wouldn't otherwise have done then it must, perhaps unknown to you, be wrong. If there is no God then He will not answer your prayers, although they might be efficacious in other ways.

Starting from support for James's critique of Clifford's dictum, the article argues for holding beliefs, whether secular or religious, firmly but provisionally, remaining open to fresh experience. This consideration prompts reflection on the debate following the attack on Charlie Hebdo. Alternative beliefs were opposing each other with seemingly equal certainty. The justification for insistence on the right to free speech itself requires scrutiny. The article finishes by noting the baleful effects of the intellectual apartheid which has tended to be practised in the West which presumes that religion and reason have nothing to do with each other.

A common answer to the title question is: being highly competent in a wide range of academic disciplines, as shown by having a large number of good exam results. Is this acceptable?

My argument is that naturalism is too restricted and dogmatic an account of the many different sorts of entities and explanations that we employ in trying to understand our world. It is a faith rather than a mode of inquiry.

People often assume that everyone can be divided by sex/gender (that is, by physical and social characteristics having to do with maleness and femaleness) into two tidy categories: male and female. Careful thought, however, leads us to reject that simple ‘binary’ picture, since not all people fall precisely into one group or the other. But if we do not think of sex/gender in terms of those two categories, how else might we think of it? Here I consider four distinct models; each model correctly captures some features of sex/gender, and so each is appropriate in some contexts. But the first three models are inadequate when tough questions arise, like whether trans women should be admitted as students at a women's college or when it is appropriate for intersex athletes to compete in women's athletic events. (‘Trans’ refers to the wide range of people who have an atypical gender identity for someone of their birth-assigned sex, and ‘intersex’ refers to people whose bodies naturally develop with markedly different physical sex characteristics than are paradigmatic of either men or women.) Such questions of inclusion and exclusion matter enormously to the people whose lives are affected by them, but ordinary notions of sex/gender offer few answers. The fourth model I describe is especially designed to make those hard decisions easier by providing a process to clarify what matters.

The hit American TV show The Good Place has garnered quite a following in recent years. Its main premise implies a scorekeeping view of the afterlife. People who have collected enough credits in their earthly lives will make the cut and go to the Good Place, while those who do not will be banished to the Bad Place. We suggest that such a premise would have to come to terms with Ted Sider's puzzle about the compatibility of a binary afterlife with God's divine attributes.

In the essay I argue that the routine use of contraception is morally tantamount to early-term abortion because it produces the same result: namely, it prevents the creation of a human life that would have otherwise probably taken place. Because it can be shown that contraception is ethically acceptable, it follows that early-term abortion is as well.

In issue 4, Mark piper presented the famous problem of evil, which appears to show that there is no God, that is to say, no all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good being. Here James Franklin suggests that there may, after all, be a solution to the problem.

Anne Conway (1631–79) produced only one short treatise – The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy – but addressed key problems in the philosophy of religion which are still much discussed today. The most significant of these are the problem of religious diversity and the problem of evil. Although the sources of her ideas may be found in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria and the work of the Cambridge Platonists and the Quaker George Keith, among others, she offers her own unorthodox solutions to these problems. The idea of Christ as an indwelling mediator of the divine who assists us in our moral endeavours is designed to appeal to those of all religions and none, while her claim that God created creatures knowing that they would eventually be redeemed, and that suffering promotes moral development which leads to redemption offers a novel response to the problem of evil. Conway's work is also important for its influence on the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and some have argued that it prefigures, at least in outline, the field theory of modern physics.

A dialogue investigating whether the usual religious defences of belief in God are really up to the job.

Chris Horner opens our debate on pragmatism with this handy introduction to the subject. Those entirely new to the topic of pragmatism might also find helpful Stephen Law's article ‘Is it all relative?’ (see issue 2 of Think).

John Shand also critically discusses Sandis' preceding paper.

This article is my latest attempt to come up with a minimal version of my evolutionary theory of fairness, previously summarized in my book Natural Justice. The naturalism that I espouse is currently unpopular, but Figure 1 shows that the scientific tradition in moral philosophy nevertheless has a long and distinguished history. John Mackie's Inventing Right and Wrong is the most eloquent expression of the case for naturalism in modern times. Mackie's demolition of the claims made for a priori reasoning in moral philosophy seem unanswerable to me.

What is art? Marcel Duchamp made this question pertinent when he developed his ‘Readymades’: ordinary, manufactured objects that he presented as art. In this paper, I use pragmatics – the branch of linguistics concerned with language use in context, and which has its historical roots in the philosophy of language – to argue that, if we accept that art is a form of communication, from artist to audience, then Duchamp was correct to claim that anything can be art, so long as it is presented as such.

When, in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York more than two decades ago, the late Queen Elizabeth II expressed her sentiments with the words: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love’, she was making a reference to British psychiatrist Dr Colin Murray Parkes's book Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life. In the book, Dr Parkes states an obvious, albeit often ignored, fact that the pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love. Following the death of the Queen in September 2022, Joe Biden, the current president of the US, used the same quote as an opportunity to express his own personal sadness about her passing. It was also an opportunity to participate in public grief about the loss of a popular leader, and of innocent lives. It is not uncommon for leaders, religious ones including, to speak of love, especially during such poignant moments. But it is somewhat less common for public figures to bring to our attention the close connection between grief and love. Even when they do, grief is commonly seen in a negative light. Philosophers provide another example of what is, I shall argue, a mischaracterization of grief.

Every one of us has had some interaction with pregnancy, having been pregnant ourselves or having been the result of someone else's pregnancy. Pregnancy is a source of fascinating philosophical issues, yet has been historically underexplored. In this article, I examine why this might be, and propose how to proceed in the investigation within the context of philosophizing today.

Being morally responsible means being blameworthy and deserving of punishment if we do wrong and praiseworthy and deserving reward if we do right. In what follows I shall argue that in all likelihood we're not morally responsible. None of us. Ever.

Moral and ethical agreements require sufficiently shared values, or at least some common ground. We might think of this in terms of a shared ‘form of life’, ‘lebensform’, as Wittgenstein describes it in his Philosophical Investigations. Yet it is not clear what will be sufficient, nor how to bridge gaps when disagreement occurs, for instance on whether it is ever right to lie. Ethical and moral theories offer some guidance, but there is no guide for which theory one ought to follow. Whether you favour eudaimonist (flourishing, well-being), deontological (duty), or utilitarian (consequentialist) principles, the selection of a philosophy says much about who you are (preferences, judgements, beliefs) and your context (social, political, cultural). More than this it can indicate certain psychological and personal dispositions, whether defined as brain states, mental states, or personalities. In this article I outline some arguments for why ethics might need a philosophy of mind, and why this poses problems for ethical and moral theory building.