 | Price Comparisons: New Only | | Sorry, the textbook you were looking for is not available as New Only, at any of the stores we searched. | Price Comparisons: Rental | | Sorry, the textbook you were looking for is not available as Rental, at any of the stores we searched. | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | Given the recent cuts in government budgets, issues such as taxation, welfare, health care, social security, and environmental protection are drawing increasing attention to the basic problems of how to divide resources equitably among all members of society. Social Issues provides a framework for discussing and resolving these current, pressing social issues. As each issue is considered, the book clarifies the moral, political, and economic dimensions that must be weighed as current programs and reform proposals are evaluated. Throughout, this book provides a forum for open discussion in which the moral values and political and economic viewpoints from different viewpoints are entertained, discussed, and evaluated. |
Average Customer Rating:   No Grounding in the "Permanent Things" Reading John Winfrey's Social Issues, it struck me just how hopeless it is to ground ethics without acknowledging the Lawgiver, as Winfrey stubbornly attempts to do. Winfrey actually adopts a view that "there is no unique principle from which moral duties can be derived. Similarly, there is no unique ordering of principles." Winfrey offers a variety of contradictory philosophies with no grounding in the "permanent things". He then proceeds to dance around the obvious conclusion for 200 pages: without a Lawgiver, ethics collapses; each person does what is right in their own eyes. The impressive array of knowledge only further proves the warnings of Solomon and Paul that such philosophy is vanity. (Col 2:8, Eccles 1:17, 12:13)
Where does this denial of a Lawgiver lead the pluralist ethicist? "Although no set weight can be assigned moral principles, our judgments as to how they should be balanced... become better informed... one's moral institutions evolve with experience." Our judgments? Have you not read that "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked"? And yet hope in an evolutionary progress corrupts the heart that is without God. As Chesterton said, It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense. He who does not believe in God will believe in anything. |  |
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