Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (born 1955) is an American philosopher. He specializes in ethics, epistemology, and more recently in neuroethics, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of cognitive science. He is the Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.[1] He earned his Ph.D. from Yale University under the supervision of Robert Fogelin and Ruth Barcan Marcus, and taught for many years at Dartmouth College, before moving to Duke.[2]
His Moral Skepticisms (2006) defends the view that we do not have fully adequate responses to the moral skeptic. It also defends a coherentist moral epistemology, which he has defended for decades. His Morality Without God? (2009) endorses the moral philosophy of his former colleague Bernard Gert as an alternative to religious views of morality.
In 1999, he debated William Lane Craig in a debate titled "God? A Debate Between A Christian and An Atheist".[3]
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues that God is not only not essential to morality, but moral behaviour should be independent of religion. A separate entity one could say. He strongly disagrees with several core ideas: that atheists are immoral people; that any society will become like lord of the flies if it becomes too secular; that without morality being laid out in front of us, like a commandment, we have no reason to be moral; that absolute moral standards require the existence of a God, he sees that people themselves are inherently good and not bad; and that without religion, we simply couldn't know what is bad and what is good.
Publications
Some of his notable publications include:
- Moral Dilemmas, Basil Blackwell, 1988.
- God? A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist, William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
- Moral Skepticisms, Oxford University Press, 2006.
- editor, Moral Psychology (Five Volumes), MIT Press, 2008.
- Morality Without God?, Oxford University Press, 2009.