@font-face { font-family: "Cambria";}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } I think there may be a couple of different questionshere. One is: do people have theright to refuse to view a movie on the grounds that they disagree with thepolitics of someone involved in the making of the movie? The answer to that is, yes, ofcourse. No one has an obligationto see any particular movie, so one can decide whether or not to view it on anygrounds whatsoever. Sometimes people find the politics of some director or actor sorepugnant that they cannot bear the thought of viewing a film in which thatperson was involved. That, notice, is a separate thing from making an aestheticjudgment about the film. One might consistently judge that a particularfilm is a masterpiece, and yet condemn the politics of the director who madeit, or the actor/actress who starred in...

William, I will try to answer both of your questions, but I especially wanted to answer the first one. I suffered from depression for most of my life, and considered, in a very personal way, the question you have asked. Forgive my presumption, but I want to make sure that, if you are asking about this because you are contemplating suicide, you know that there are some very effective therapies now for depression. I am not referring just to drug therapies, although medication was crucial (and is crucial) to my recovery; talk therapy is important too. It is not always easy to find an effective and tolerable therapy regimen -- I tried two anti-depressants before I found one that worked -- so (again, excuse my presumption) if you have tried one or even two or three that have not helped, you may need to try another. If all this is irrelevant, then good. The ethical question you ask is a hard one, but I believe that a person who is suffering terribly and who has no reasonable prospect of gaining...

I don't know if this is Singer's view or not. I just want to respond to the suggestion that the view "shows a progression of the pro-choice stance on abortion extending beyond the womb." Do not buy the facile and cynical "slippery slope" argument advanced by some unscrupulous people that holds that any principle that justifies abortion in any circumstances will lead inexorably to a validation of heinous practices like murder of unwanted children or elderly adults. The term "pro-choice" refers to a particular political position: it is the position that the decision whether to continue a pregnancy should be made the pregnant person, not the government. People who are pro-choice do not necessarily agree on the morality of abortion -- they do not all agree on the conditions in which abortion is morally permissible, and they may not even agree that abortion is ever morally permissible. (Many members of the organization Catholics for Free Choice believe on theological grounds that abortion...

Your question contains a false presupposition, viz., that "the only way to avoid [privileging yourself] is to only choose for the other person." If one wanted to be scrupulously impartial, one would have to treat all persons as having an equal moral claim on you. But you are yourself a person -- so you are among those who have a moral claim. So the best way to implement impartiality would be by doing a lottery in which you also hold a ticket; deciding, in other words, through some random procedure who should get the benefit of your moral concern in a given instance. The point is important, and one that is stressed by both rules-theorists (or deontologists ) like Kant, and consequentialists, like Mill. For Kant, it is the fact that human beings have the capacity for reason that makes them appropriate objects of moral concern. Since you have the capacity for reason, you are precisely as morally valuable as anyone else. You thus have duties to yourself , and it would be as much a...

I am not sure you really have a philosophical question here. You worry that it might be morally wrong for you to continue to date a man with autism because he "may not fully understand his feelings or mine." I suspect that you are laboring under a misunderstanding of the nature of "autism." An autistic individual is not necessarily incapable of introspecting or articulating his (or her) own feelings; nor is an autistic person necessarily unable to understand the feelings of others. What appears to be the case, according to the experts I have read, is that autistic individuals lack certain ways of coming to understand the feelings of others that non-autistic people find natural. Autistic individuals typically have trouble "reading" facial expressions and body language, for example. Nonetheless, many autistic people contrive other ways of learning about the psychological states of other people, ways that are often effective enough that these other people don't realize that they're interacting...

Human sexuality is complex and unpredictable. In particular, it's hard to know what effect the initiation of a sexual relationship is going to have on a person's emotional connections -- to the new sexual partner, or to others. Some people seem capable of having casual sexual relationships without forming any lasting romantic attachments, while other people seem incapable of forming a sexual relationship unless they have some antecedent emotional connection with the prospective partner. Some people feel that the physical intimacy inherent in sexual congress is necessarily self-revelatory and thus intimate in non-physical ways as well; others feel that the physical intimacy of sex need be no more personally "meaningful" than that inherent in a good massage. I don't see that any of these reactions or attitudes is more "ethical" than any other -- they are matters on which reasonable people are probably always going to differ. Given all that, I think it's up to individuals to reach agreement...

I suspect that when people think it’s immoral for someone to enjoy a violent video game, they are presuming that they know the answer to what is in fact an empirical question: do the attitudes and appetites that the gamer is indulging during play “carry over” to real life? Does the “bloodlust” of the gamer predicts or cause real bloodlust. Will playing such games render the gamer less sensitive to real violence? My experience suggests that the gamer’s attitudes do not carry over to real life. I like to play violent video games, but I can only remember one instance in my whole life in which I actually hit someone (my son – and I sorely regret it), and I still find I’m revolted by photos or descriptions of scenes of torture and war. I’m not the only one like this – if I were, then either violent movies would be a lot less popular, or there’d be a lot more murderous rampaging going on than there is. I suspect that it’s really important to the games’ and movies’ being fun that the players and the...

I agree with the thrust of your comments -- that there should be uniform physical requirements for anyone who wishes to serve in the military, and these requirements should be based on the physical demands of the jobs recruits will be required to do. But it's this second proposition that should engage our attention. What are the physical demands of a military career? Modern warfare is highly mechanized; that means both that a great many combat roles will not require much in the way of brute physical strength, and that many will require specialized knowledge and mental skills. There are, in short, no uniform physical requirements for serving in "today's army." So it may well be that the relaxed physical standards for women result in no loss of combat readiness whatsoever. In that case, the relaxed standards ought to be the norm for everyone, with more demanding standards imposed only for those who wish to serve in the more physically demanding roles. My guess is that the sexism involved...

Developing technologies have always caused new ethical challenges to arise, often by making once impossible states of affairs possible. Insofar as our ethical thinking has failed to take account of these new possibilities, our ethical systems will be tested. But I see no reason to think that foundational ethical facts, like the wrongness of causing gratuitous pain to a sentient creature, are under any threat from new inventions. You probably have in mind developments like in vitro fertilization and cloning. These developments challenge us to think harder about what it is about what qualities are really at the heart of moral personhood -- is it the mere biological fact of human specieshood, or is rather certain capacities, like being able to feel pain, or being able to reason? They also raise questions about what human beings ought to have the right to try to control, since they offer us the prospect of controlling things we couldn't at earlier times in our histories. Notice that...

I don't know if there is any general presumption that intelligence and morality go together. And it's up for grabs, I think, whether there is any general faculty of "intelligence," equally applicable to, and equally present in all domains. But suppose we're talking about "school intelligence" -- the kind of ability that's tested on IQ tests. In that case, I think the following can be said: If one is basically a good person, or tries sincerely to be, then intelligence can be an aid in acting morally, and in understanding what morality is. It can help you develop a comprehensive and consistent system of moral principles, help you render your judgements consistent, help you think of new cases to test out your principles, and help you keep your thinking straight when matters get complicated. But if you are dishonest, insensitive, selfish, cruel, or negligent, intelligence can be a hindrance to your moral development insofar as it facilitates your constructing clever, but bogus...