by Several of the major atheist websites have a specific forum for formal debates.
I don't think there's any point in creating one here yet, but I want to gauge interest in involvement in such debates. Atheists are notoriously confrontational, so I doubt it would be hard to find someone to oppose any resolution on consequentialism, even a relatively modest one.
The idea would be a) (obviously) to make a good case for consequentialism over the other ideas on ethics atheists are likely to have, and b) to increase awareness of this forum. So I was thinking of proposing to one or more of the forums above a setup where, for eg, we host the debate thread, and they host a peanut gallery, both linking to each other.
These things can obviously be quite time-consuming, depending on how well you know the subject (though they can also be very good for learning more about it if you don't), and how much you want to approach it as a referenced essay, how much you just want to argue your own view. In principle there's no reason why one or both sides couldn't be co-authored to save some time. That's probably only worth it if the authors both have very similar views and live close enough to each other to easily communicate, though.
So, would anyone be interested in getting involved in such a thread, either now or in the next few months? The topic could be pretty much anything, really - most of the threads on the secular forums are about religion or the excesses of Christian ethics, so anything that brought them closer to ethics, applied or theoretical, would be well worth doing IMO - the peanut galleries tend to attract quite a lot of attention. More so for controversial topics, unsurprisingly...
I don't think there's any point in creating one here yet, but I want to gauge interest in involvement in such debates. Atheists are notoriously confrontational, so I doubt it would be hard to find someone to oppose any resolution on consequentialism, even a relatively modest one.
The idea would be a) (obviously) to make a good case for consequentialism over the other ideas on ethics atheists are likely to have, and b) to increase awareness of this forum. So I was thinking of proposing to one or more of the forums above a setup where, for eg, we host the debate thread, and they host a peanut gallery, both linking to each other.
These things can obviously be quite time-consuming, depending on how well you know the subject (though they can also be very good for learning more about it if you don't), and how much you want to approach it as a referenced essay, how much you just want to argue your own view. In principle there's no reason why one or both sides couldn't be co-authored to save some time. That's probably only worth it if the authors both have very similar views and live close enough to each other to easily communicate, though.
So, would anyone be interested in getting involved in such a thread, either now or in the next few months? The topic could be pretty much anything, really - most of the threads on the secular forums are about religion or the excesses of Christian ethics, so anything that brought them closer to ethics, applied or theoretical, would be well worth doing IMO - the peanut galleries tend to attract quite a lot of attention. More so for controversial topics, unsurprisingly...
