Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Picture of Christopher O. Tollefsen

Christopher O. Tollefsen

Christopher Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy and the Peter McCausland Chair in Civic Engagement at the University of South Carolina. His most recent book is Killing and Christian Ethics, published by Cambridge University Press. He is the Executive Director for the University of South Carolina’s Center for American Civic Leadership and Public Discourse.

Public Discourse

Moral Absolutes and the Moral Life

By
Moral absolutes are not “mere” restrictions on our actions. Nor should they be suspended even when upholding them might bring about grave consequences. They are essential for protecting human wellbeing.
Public Discourse

Punishment: Political, Not Metaphysical

By
The presumptive starting point in the natural law and, more specifically, Christian tradition is one of absolute opposition to intentional killing of beings created in the image of God, for which exceptions must be earned; but the traditional justifications for such exceptions fail.
Public Discourse

Capital Punishment, Dignity, and Authority: A Response to Ed Feser

By
Nothing that a man does can change his nature as man, and so, considered in himself, it will always remain wrong to kill him. This should be the final judgment of practical reason when brought to bear on the question of capital punishment.
Public Discourse

Capital Punishment, Sanctity of Life, and Human Dignity

By
Intentional killing is always wrong, and support of capital punishment often stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of human dignity.
Public Discourse

Contraception and Healthcare Rights

By
Contraception does not respond to an authentic healthcare need, and the state acts untruthfully and beyond its legitimate authority when it mandates contraception coverage.
Public Discourse

The Caregiver’s Lesson

By
Those who care for the severely disabled and dependent testify to our sense that they are part of the human community.
Public Discourse

Thoughts About Oughts

By
The requirements of natural reason in the pursuit of goods provide a more adequate starting point for moral reflection than the theological considerations in which moral reflection should come to its fruition.
Public Discourse

Terry Jones’ Lethal Recklessness

By
A person bears moral responsibility for the foreseeable side effects of his reckless actions.
Public Discourse

Speaking Truth to Evil

By
The Live Action case is very different from the Nazis-at-the-door problem, but lying is justified in neither situation.
Public Discourse

Why Lying is Always Wrong

By
Lying, even for laudable reasons, is wrong.
Public Discourse

Truth, Love, and Live Action

By
The pro-life cause must be advanced by truth and by love, and it must be willing to engage in self-criticism when it fails to meet its own exacting standards.
Public Discourse

The Argument Over Pregnancy: And Why it Matters

By
Accepting the “liberal” definition on pregnancy can actually help clarify the morality of contraception, abortion, and embryo adoption.
Public Discourse

The Abiding Significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

By
Americans must still wrestle with what it means to take the lives of innocent civilians intentionally.
Public Discourse

Health Care, Abortion, and the Call of Conscience

By
Under the new health-care law, pro-lifers may have to accept inferior health plans, rather than wrongly pay into abortion providing ones.
Public Discourse

Immigration and Self-Governance

By
Three issues—the right to secure borders, the moral costs of illegal immigration, and the virtues of generous neighborliness and forgiveness—must be clarified in order to address the problems of immigration reform.
Public Discourse

Liberalism and Higher Education

By
Sometimes a defense of shared liberal values can become the partisan promotion of one of liberalism's strands.
Public Discourse

Marc Thiessen, Double Effect, and the Torturer’s Dilemma

By
Both Marc Thiessen and his critics have misunderstood an important moral distinction on the question of torture.
Public Discourse

Are There Harms of Home Schooling?

By
Critics of home-schooling need to be tutored about the nature of education and the family.
Public Discourse

Duty and Disability

By
Having spent 20 years wrongly diagnosed as in a persistent vegetative state, Rom Houben reminds us that disabled persons are capable of many more substantive opportunities for human fulfillment than we are initially inclined to believe. But is bodily life just as such worth preserving? Can care-givers rightly remove hydration and nutrition?
Public Discourse

What Makes a Woman a Woman: The Case of Caster Semenya

By
Sugar, spice, and everything nice or snaps, snails, and puppy-dog tails? A controversy over a South African runner makes us ask what boys and girls are made of.
Public Discourse

What Is Public Discourse?

By
If citizens and politicians believe that victory is to the loudest, or to the most dramatic, then loud and dramatic they will be. The process of public discourse, by contrast, is often deliberative, difficult, and slow. Its participants must, on occasion, “dare to be boring.”
Public Discourse

Philosophy and the Embryo

By
Pragmatic and moral considerations should not be allowed to distort science, nor should they distract philosophy from its pursuit of truth.
Public Discourse

Health Care Reform and the Public Option in Theory and Practice

By
Those who favor providing health care to all shouldn’t necessarily oppose the “public option,” but they will be unable to support a bill if it endorses and entrenches the taking of innocent human life through abortion.
Public Discourse

Infidelity and Its Implications

By
As recent polls and recent events show, Americans remain morally opposed to sexual infidelity in marriage. At the same time, Americans show broad acceptance of premarital sex. But an examination of the reasons why infidelity within marriage is detrimental to human flourishing reveals sexual infidelity prior to marriage to be just as harmful.