morality Archives • Richard Carrier Blogs

The Ontology of Moral Facts

Richard Carrier — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 23:12:14 +0000

Fifteen years ago I was asked to give a lecture to Christian high school students on “the ontology of morality,” which I did using clips from movies and television shows to illustrate the physical instantiation of moral facts in interacting human systems. They did remarkably well in understanding the subject. I then wrote up my […]

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How Pseudo-Rationality Grounds Conservative Worldviews: My Debatecon Followup

Richard Carrier — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 20:42:17 +0000

This month I was invited to two debates at Debatecon 6 in Nashville hosted by Modern Day Debate: the existence of God with Michael Jones of Inspiring Philosophy and Christian Nationalism vs. Secular Humanism with Andrew Wilson. It was okay. But I have thoughts. I’ll first describe my personal impressions. Then summarize why the Wilson […]

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New Publication: Objective Moral Facts Exist in All Possible Universes

Richard Carrier — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 16:11:09 +0000

I have a new peer-reviewed publication in philosophy: “Objective Moral Facts Exist in All Possible Universes,” Religions 16.8 (2025). This consolidates my previous peer-reviewed work on metaethics (“Moral Facts Naturally Exist (and Science Could Find Them,” in The End of Christianity, ed. John Loftus, Prometheus 2011) and subsequent blogging and debates into a new peer-reviewed […]

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The Carrier-Wilson Debate in Nashville: Christianity Or Secular Humanism, Which Is Best for Society?

Richard Carrier — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 16:06:56 +0000

I will be debating Andrew Wilson, live on stage, in Nashville, Tennessee, this November 16. Yes, that Andrew Wilson. I expect it will be a dumpster fire like it was with Sargon, and as experienced by Dillahunty last year with Wilson. But I’ll stick around. Because I only do this for real money now, as […]

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A Simple Thought Experiment That Destroys Plantinga’s Free WIll Defense of Evil

Richard Carrier — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 17:50:05 +0000

I combine the arguments of James Sterba and my Zardoz simworld framework to show how to use single-point slam-dunks to destroy apologetics, in this case, Plantinga's Free Will Defense.

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Debunking John Davidson’s “Pagan” America

Richard Carrier — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 20:38:42 +0000

Did you know we’re all pagans? That’s right. America is majority pagan. We worship Ishtar and the Onion God and have cool-ass pagan festivals featuring palm fronds and sacred orgies. Public feasts in every town distribute meat and mead, blessed by pagan priestesses in ancient regalia, to all the townsfolk, at public or patriot expense. […]

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Four Representative Examples of Roman Attitudes Toward Infanticide

Richard Carrier — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 15:34:51 +0000

In my recent article on Orphans (What About Orphans, Then?) I mentioned the following: Contrary to lore, the ancients did not just chuck unwanted infants into the wilderness to starve. While “exposure” as this was called was legal until Christians got sterner about it (though even then Christians waffled a lot on whether or how […]

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What About Orphans, Then?

Richard Carrier — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 19:53:50 +0000

I get constant attempts to salvage something, some desperate crumb of Western moral decency or innovation, that can be credited to Christianity. They always end up mythical, or too trivial to impress. As I explain in No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West (and the many articles linked to from there), […]

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Bayesian Analysis of Faria Costa’s Theory of Group Agency

Richard Carrier — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 17:28:06 +0000

Last September I ran a project testing the merits of peer-reviewed history articles, by selecting three articles at random and analyzing their methodology and its underlying Bayesian logic (because, really, all sound epistemic reasoning is Bayesian: see A Bayesian Analysis of Susannah Rees’s Ishtar-in-the-Manosphere Thesis; A Bayesian Analysis of Kate Loveman’s Pepys Diary Thesis; and […]

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How A Personal Fear of Death Might Also Be Driving the Anti-Abortion Delusion

Richard Carrier — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 18:49:51 +0000

I had a thought recently about abortion ideology that I wanted to explore. I used to think the only prime driver of anti-abortionism is literally just Christian patriarchy (predominately in the West at least; elsewhere it might be Islamic patriarchy). In other words, this is really just a desire to enforce sexist gender norms, lest […]

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