ikewise an analysisof plausible versions of the principle that without the cause there wouldbe no effect leads to much the same conclusion. The best explanation ofwhy the PSR holds in everyday contexts is that the PSR is metaphysicallynecessary. Our epistemic practices become quite dubious in the absenceof the PSR. Finally, the best theory of what makes alethic modal claimstrue has, as a surprising consequence, the truth of the PSR

Objectivism also has a natural and appealing account of the possibilitiesfor moral mistake. If truth is set in some objective fashion, then it is easyto explain why so many of us, at least some of the time, lapse into moralerror. Subjectivists, on the other hand, fix moral truth by the (relatively)uncorrected actual attitudes of individuals or groups. Few of us are willingto allow that such attitudes are definitive of moral truths. We don't thinkthat the most deeply held views of individuals or groups are infallible. TheNazi may believe to his core that Jews are inferior, and a culture may haveas its foundational creed that only men can occupy an exalted moral position.But these views are false nonetheless (even if, as is unlikely, such attitudes areself-standing or not based on false factual information). Ethical objectivismeasily accommodates this claim. Subjectivism does not.

According toTr, in possible worlds where God does not exist, if any, orissues no commands, everything is permitted. In worlds whereGod commands certain things what is required and forbiddenvaries from world to world as God’s commands do. Accordingto T2, in possible worlds where God does not exist, if any, orGod does not make the universe or God issues no commands,everything is permitted, Strikingly, if God did not make theuniverse, then everything is permitted no matter what hecommands, and, moreover, in that case nothing is required orforbidden. Only in worlds where God made the universe andissues some commands is anything required or forbidden, and inthose worlds what is required and what is forbidden varies asGod’s commands do. According to T3, in possible worlds whereGod did not make the universe nothing is required, nothing is,forbidden and nothing is permitted, and obviously the case isthe same in worlds, if any, where God does not exist, In worlds

where God exists and made the universe but issues no com-mands, everything is permitted. T

Things are required or for-bidden only in worlds where God made the universe and com-mands certain things, and what is required or forbidden inthese worlds varies as God’s commands vary.

Tn addition to innumerable particular claims like these, adivine command theorist might wish to have certain moregeneral principles turn out to be consequences of his theory.One of them we might call ‘Karamazov’s Thesis’:If God did not exist, then everything would be permitted,This thesis certainly asserts a strong dependency of moral statuson the nature of things theological, but according to some ofthe theories we shall discuss Karamazov’s Thesis is a theorem.

To thisHume could, and would need to, reply that this objection in-volves the postulating of value-entities or value-features ofquite a different order from anything else with which we areacquainted, and of a corresponding faculty with which to detectthem.

Another way of bringing out this queerness is to ask, aboutanything that is supposed to have some objective moral quality,how this.is linked with its natural features. What is the con-nection between the natural fact that an action is a piece ofdeliberate cruelty - say, causing pain just for fun - and themoral fact that it is wrong? It cannot be an entailment, a logicalor semantic necessity.Yet itis not merely that thetwo features oc-cur together. The wrongness must somehow be 'consequential'or 'supervenient'; it is wrong because it is a piece of deliberatecruelty. But just what in the world is signified by this 'be-cause'? And how do we know the relation that it signifies, if thisis something more than such actions being socially condemned,and condemned by us too, perhaps through our having absorbedattitudes from our social environment? It is not even sufficientto postulate a faculty which 'sees' the wrongness: somethingmust be. postulated which can see at once the natural featuresthat constitute the cruelty, and the wrongness, and the mys-terious consequential link between the two. Alternatively..theintuition required might be the perception that wrongness is ahigher order property belonging to certain natural properties;but what is this belonging of properties to other properties, andhow can we discern it? How much simpler and more com-prehensible the situation would be if we could replace the moralquality with some sort of subjective response which could becausally related to the detection of the natural features onwhich the supposed quality is said to be consequential.

his has two parts,one metaphysical, the other epistemological. If there were ob-jective values, then they would be entities or qualities or rela-tions of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything elsein the universe. Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, itwould have to be by some special faculty of moral perception orintuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowingeverything else.

In particular, carbon–oxygen-based life as we know appearsunlikely to become strongly disfavoured for relative changes smaller than  3% in mqor αem .

If thenuclear 'glue' were weaker, so that E were 0.006 rather than0.007, a proton could not be bonded to a neutron anddeuterium would not be stable.

But wecouldn't have existed if E had been more than 0.008, becauseno hydrogen would have survived from the Big Bang.

o be catastrophic to the formation of life-essential car-bon and oxygen. A similar calculation of the tolerance forshifts in the EM fine-structure constant αem suggests thatcarbon-oxygen based life can withstand shifts of ≃ 2.5%in αem. Beyond such relatively small changes in the funda-mental parameters, the anthropic principle appears neces-sary to explain the observed abundances of 12C and 16O.We also note that the fine-tuning in the fundamental pa-rameters is much more severe than the one in the energydifference ε.

The cen-tral values of ̄As and ̄At from Eq. (94) suggest that varia-tions in the light quark masses of up to 2−3% are unlikely

One can see in Fig. 2 that a 0.5% change in the N-N interaction strength would leadto a Universe which does not contain an appreciable amount of carbon or oxygen

Whenapplied to the Friedmann metric it requires that the cosmological constant measuredtoday, tU , be  ∼ t−2U ∼ 10−122 , as observed.

Note well the logarithmic scale — the lackof a left boundary to the life-permitting region is becausewe have scaled the axis so that rL ¼ 0 is at x ¼ N. Theuniverse re-collapses before life can form for rL t10121 (Peacock 2007).

We conclude that the universe is fine-tuned for the exis-tence of life. Of all the ways that the laws of nature,constants of physics and initial conditions of the universecould have been, only a very small subset permits theexistence of intelligent life.

On the other hand, it definitely does follow from causal finitism together withthe denial of the possibility of causal loops that there must be an uncaused cause.Investigation is needed whether this uncaused cause is something natural, like the BigBang, or something supernatural, like God.