Suppose we accept your proposal that if something is morally good, then everybody has a moral reason to prefer it. It doesn't follow though, at least without additional argument, that if everyone has moral reason to prefer something, everyone has a moral duty to do that thing. For there may be moral reasons incumbent only on some rather than on others. If Lucretia has a child, I may concede both that her child's being well fed is morally good and that everyone has a moral reason to prefer her child being well-fed, but it may not be true that everyone (me included!) has a moral duty to feed her child. For instance, it may be true that I don't have such a duty precisely because Lucretia does have such a duty — she being her child's mother, she has a special duty to ensure that she is well fed that I (and others) have. Such special duties seem relatively common: A firefighter has a duty to rescue someone that I do not. I have a duty to educate my students that the firefighter does not. And so on....

I'm surprised that you weren't able to find some philosophical material on this issue: The topic of the morality of political communication is an old one (Plato's Allegory of the Cave can be read as a commentary on political manipulation). Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent) is a well-known exploration of political manipulation, though perhaps not very 'philosophical' in its approach. More recently, Jason Stanley has defined propaganda as "“manipulation of the rational will to close off debate” and argued that such manipulation undermines democracy. (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10448.html) This recent collection of articles (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/manipulation-9780199338207?cc=us&lang=en&#) may prove useful to you also. I think you capture the case against manipulation in the public realm quite well: Your case against it has a decidedly Kantian ring — that individuals have the right to the information necessary to form...

You're certainly correct that there is a tendency in suppose that reason and emotion are antagonists, and that with respect to morality in particular, we should be guided by reason rather than emotion. And there may be major figures in the history of philosophy (Plato comes to mind) who really did see reason and emotion as in stark and irreconcilable tension. But there's a pretty significant segment of philosophers, both historical and contemporary, who don't think that reason and emotion are such enemies when it comes to moral reasoning and decision. On this view, reason and emotion are essential partners in moral thought and deliberation instead of implacable antagonists. A popular account (one that I myself find attractive) distinguishes between moral truth and moral knowledge: Emotions, on this view, are not a source of moral truth, but do enable you to know moral truths. Suppose that, as you end a day of busy holiday shopping, you see a fellow shopper carrying a large bundle of shopping bags. She...

You raise an interesting point: Usually, experiments such as Milgram's are used to cast doubt on the existence or durability of moral integrity and character. If otherwise ordinary individuals , those very unlikely to inflict potentially deadly electrical shocks, do so at the behest of an experimenter, then how can we say that people's moral dispositions are stable or deep seated? Milgram's experiment has been central to the emergence of situationism in moral psychology, the thesis that our moral choices and actions are influenced far less by facts about ourselves, including our own reasoning, and far more by situational factors, which are often irrelevant to the moral justifiability of our choices and actions. Your thought (I take it) is that perhaps Milgram's experimental subjects were not influenced by irrelevant situational facts but were responding to a morally relevant consideration: the trust they put in the experimenters , to wit, that the experiment was not unethical. This strikes me as...

Leaving aside the gargantuan question 'what constitutes a duty?', let's focus on the question of whether the elderly ever have a duty to die. In a famous article http://web.utk.edu/~jhardwig/dutydie.htm, John Hardwig argues that some elderly or ill individuals have a duty to die. Very roughly, his thought is that one can have an obligation not to impose unfair burdens on others (financial, emotional, etc.). Since the ill or elderly often have medical conditions that are unduly burdensome to others, then if the only route to their avoiding imposing these burdens is for them to end their lives prematurely, then they have (according to Hardwig) a duty to die. Hardwig's argument evoked a great deal of hostility when it was first published, and few philosophers have accepted it without controversy. Some of these criticisms are collected here http://www.amazon.com/There-Duty-Die-Bioethics-Reflective/dp/0415922429/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1453420574&sr=1-1&keywords=Hardwig+duty+to+die and http://www...

'Impartiality' is in no way a simple moral concept. Yet one thing most moral philosophers would agree upon is that impartiality cannot be plausibly equated with treating everyone the same . Rather, impartiality seems to have both an exclusionary and and an inclusionary aspect. Here's what I have in mind. Being impartial means not allowing a certain fact or consideration about people to influence a choice or a policy. A judge who routinely convicts defendants with mustaches while routinely acquitting the clean shaven makes her decisions on the basis of a fact or consideration — the state of a person's facial hair — that ought not influence her decisions. Here she fails to be impartial because she does not exclude from her decision making a factor she ought to exclude. Conversely, suppose a judge issues her rulings without regard to whether the evidence provided indicates a defendant's guilt. Here she fails to be impartial because she does not include a factor she ought to include in order to be...

I'd be surprised if there were sound arguments for the immortality of homosexuality, but I agree with your suggestion that whether or not LGBT persons are 'born that way' or not cannot provide a sound basis for the immortality of homosexuality -- nor can it provide a sound basis for its moral permissibility of homosexuality either! Your remarks about pedophilia suggest why such arguments are unsound: That a person is born in some way does not imply that actions they perform because they were born that way are not wrong. If (as seems likely) pedophilia is harmful to children, that it is wrong even if pedophiles can't refrain from having sexual desires directed at children. 'He/she was born with property P; he/she does X because he/she has property P; therefore, X is not morally wrong' is not a valid inference. But perhaps this misunderstands the force of the 'born that way' claim. Perhaps the force resides not in the idea that being 'born that way' makes a person's actions morally permissible but that...

In no way a simple question! First, you ask whether the "opposing sides" in a moral disagreement can "discern the truth" of the moral issue at hand. That raises some terrifically complex questions in moral epistemology, namely, just how do we know moral truths at all? From experience? From the testimony of others? By reasoning? By means of some sort of intuition or perception? Some combination of these? I propose we set those questions aside and focus on some narrower questions about moral disagreement itself: Why do people morally disagree, and is there a suitable way to resolve these disagreements? Much depends on precisely where the source of the disagreement resides. Let's distinguish four sources of moral disagreement. Many moral disagreements turn not on moral claims but on disputed questions of fact. For instance, suppose that two people disagree about the morality of capital punishment, one believing it morally justified, the other believing it morally unjustified. However, they may well agree...

A nice place to start in thinking about this question is book I of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.1.i.html There Aristotle addresses the nature of happiness and consider the pros and cons of three sorts of lives: the life devoted to pleasure, the life devoted to money, and the 'political' life (or the life devoted to honor). You don't say in your question what you have in mind by 'glory,' but it seems similar to what Aristotle had in mind by honor, namely, others bestowing on us recognition or other goods as a mark of our merit or virtue. Aristotle argues that the best life is not devoted to honor. Here is the main passage where Aristotle argue for this: A consideration of the prominent types of life shows that people of superior refinement and of active disposition identify happiness with honour; for this is, roughly speaking, the end of the political life. But it seems too superficial to be what we are looking for, since it is thought to depend on...

Let's begin with the statement "our capacity to reason makes us moral." Philosophers often distinguish between moral agents and moral patients . These are somewhat technical terms, but the rough idea is that an individual is a moral agent just in case that individual can be properly held morally responsible, that is, it can be correct to say of that individual that it has an obligation to do A, a duty to do B, etc. Adult human beings are typically thought of moral agents — they are capable of acting rightly or wrongly. Bacteria, for example, definitely aren't moral agents. An individual is a moral patient if facts about it make it worthy of moral consideration. Moral patients have some property or status that necessitate moral agents taken those individuals into account in their moral reasoning. Philosophers disagree a little about what makes an individual a moral agent -- and a lot about what makes an individual a moral patient. Some philosophers, such as Kant, thought one and the same property...