Recently, in the final game of World Cup, French midfielder Zinedine Zidane headbutted Italian defender Marco Materazzi for insulting him. In the aftermath, Zidane apologized in an interview with a French television but added that he didn't regret hic actions. Can one coherently apologize for an action yet not regret that action? Or is Zidane false in one of his claims (the apology or the lack of regret)?

That depends on exactly what he was apologizing for, and what he meant when he said he didn't regret the action. I'm sure that he was genuinely sorry that his action caused embarrassment and shame to France. That is quite consistent with believing that he was justified in his action, and that he would do it again in similar circumstances. That is probably what he meant by saying that he didn't regret the action. Of course, he might just have been inconsistent. There was an enormous amount of pressure on him to apologize. I suspect that most public apologies are insincere.

If a mother gives birth to a person who goes on to become a serial killer, has she done something immoral? Wouldn't a Utilitarian say that the act of giving birth to that child will decrease the general level of happiness? Great site by the way.

There are different versions of Utilitarianism. Some judge actions by their actual consequences, others by their foreseeable, or expected consequences. All judge actions in comparison with alternative possible actions. I doubt that the act of giving birth had any possible alternatives. However, you could just as easily ask your question about the act of conception, or rather the sex that led to the conception. Utilitarians who judge actions by their foreseeable consequences would not judge the conception of a serial killer to have been wrong, unless it could somehow have been foreseen that the resultant person would be a serial killer. Utilitarians who judge actions by their actual consequences might well say that the conception was wrong, but they would add that it was not blameworthy. Utilitarians, and consequentialists generally, distinguish between the morality of an action and the character of an agent. It is perfectly possible for a good or right action to reflect badly on the agent, or for a bad...

DOES LIFE AFTER DEATH EXIST??? WHAT REASONS COULD WE GIVE TO DENY ITS EXISTENCE??? THANX

The main reason we could give to deny the existence of life after death is that we have no good evidence for its existence. The question of when an absence of evidence for the existence of something is a (good) reason to deny its existence is complicated. But consider the existence of the Easter Bunny, or of an undetectable pink elephant in your bedroom.

I have been reading about abortion recently and came across a ‘thought experiment’ used by Judis Jarvis Thomson about an expanding baby. The scenario is that you're in your house when your baby starts expanding rapidly. You realise that you have no chance of getting out and the only way to survive is to pop and kill the baby. The idea is that this is an analogy for mothers who will die if an abortion is not performed i.e. is it ok to kill in this form of self-defence? These thought experiments are designed to provoke a moral attitude which can then be applied to discover your true feelings on a particular issue. My instant reaction was that yes, it was ok to pop the baby in order to survive and therefore I believe abortion is ok if it saves the life of the mother. However, imagine that the baby is now an analogy not for abortion but for a virus like AIDS, by the same thought experiment it could be argued that saying yes would justify killing everyone who had AIDS in order to save everyone else in...

I agree with Richard that Thomson's analogy doesn't apply to the AIDS victims, as opposed to the virus. I wanted to add something about the reliability of thought experiments in general, though. Philosophers like Thomson (and Kamm) employ imaginary examples in a quasi scientific manner. The example, or rather a consideration of the example, is like an experiment. Our intuitive reactions to the examples are the results of the experiment--the data. We are then supposed to construct moral theories that fit the data. The problem is that our moral intuitions are influenced by all kinds of factors, including ones that those same moral intuitions tell us are morally irrelevant. A pretty good examination of this problem is contained in Peter Unger's excellent (but slightly annoyingly written) book Living High and Letting Die . This doesn't mean that we should abandon imaginary examples altogether. They can serve as a pretty good consistency check on a position, for example. But we certainly shouldn't...