Let's start with a distinction between your feelings and your actions. I might be flattered that someone is in love with me; the feeling isn't wrong by itself. But if I lead the person on when I don't feel the same way about them, that's another matter. So the question is: are you taking advantage of him? There are a couple of obvious things to ask. If the tables were turned, how would you feel about what was going on? And as things actually stand, how do you think he'd react if he found out how you really feel? That second question is the really important one. If you suspect he'd be unhappy that you're accepting his gifts and attentions even though you don't love him and love someone else, then it's pretty obvious: you're using him as a means to your own ends. That's wrong. Of course there's another possibility: the fact that you enjoy not just his gifts but also his attention and care could mean that there's a difference between the way you say you feel about him (even to yourself)...

Love is not confined to opposite sex attraction, and in spite of what some people will tell you, there is nothing wrong with that. The reasons people give for saying that it is wrong just don't hold water. We could go over some of those reasons, but there's so little to them that it's not really a productive exercise. Some people are especially bothered by religious objections, but it's worth noticing that more and more religious bodies are changing. Just days ago, for example, the Episcopal Church voted to institute ceremonies blessing life-long same-sex commitments. For many of us, what's really convincing is what we see. I have far too many friends and loved ones in healthy, sustaining same-sex relationships to find anything convincing in the objections you sometimes hear. I don't know whether your friend feels the same way. If she does, good for both of you! If not, don't be discouraged. There are others who have the kinds of feelings you have and the days when people feel they need to...

It might be worth starting with a qualifier: for many utilitarians, "pleasure" is too simple a notion to capture what they think we should maximize. "Happiness " might be better, and "well-being" better yet. But set that aside and suppose we can make do with the word "pleasure." On the first question – whether we can feel pleasure as intense as the pain we're capable of – it's hard to say. We're obviously capable of short bursts of intense pleasure, but whether they're as intense as some kinds of pain is hard to judge. More important, perhaps, even if the intensity of our greatest pleasures matches the intensity of our worst pains, pain seems able to go on for a lot longer; if we factor duration into the accounting, the answer seems to be no. But suppose otherwise. Even if we're utilitarians, the goal is to maximize total pleasure; trying to maximize intense pleasure might not be the best way to do that. We might very well get far more bang for our buck by trying to alleviate suffering or...

Just what forgiveness amounts to is an interesting question. As a wise teacher once noted, it's not a matter of simply forgetting; even if I forgive someone, prudence might dictate that I be careful not to let them hurt me again. One way to think of it is that to forgive someone for what they've done is to cancel their moral debt to you, so to speak: not to ask for anything more by way of amends. Sometimes we forgive people because they've made amends or at least expressed real regret. Sometimes we do it even if they haven't come to see the wrong in what they did. Sometimes we do it because it does us no good to keep the debt on the books, and because the letting go liberates us . The difference between this kind of forgiving and simply getting past some hurt may not be easy to see. If I don't dwell on the hurt but still feel contempt for the wrongdoer, that probably doesn't count as forgiveness. But for your situation, the difference may not matter. What I hear you saying is that you want...

You're quite right: ordinary moral intuitions aren't infallible. However, the sort of criticisms you have in mind doesn't really suppose that they are. Start with an extreme case. Suppose someone came up with a moral theory with the consequence that most of our common moral beliefs were wrong. Now ask yourself: what sort of reason could we have to believe this moral theory? The point is that there's no possible way of making sense of this; perhaps there is. But if I'm told that my ordinary moral judgments are massively wrong, there would be a real problem about what sort of reason we could have to accept the very unintuitive theory from which that consequence flowed. Or take a more concrete example. Suppose some moral theory had the consequence that wanton cruelty toward innocent people was a good thing. I don't know about you, but I find it hard to imagine what could possibly make this moral theory more plausible than my ordinary moral belief that wanton cruelty is very wrong indeed. ...

The second question is easiest: there isn't any such branch of philosophy for a very simple reason: philosophy isn't in the business of predicting what will happen. Perhaps some branch of some social science might address such a question, but if so, it would be a very different sort of thing than philosophy. But putting on my philosopher's hat… To say that yesterday's vices become today's virtues calls for a question and a distinction. The distinction is between what people take to be good or bad, virtuous or vicious and what is good or bad, virtuous or vicious. People – some people, at least – once took keeping women from being educated to be a good thing. What we now think is that this rested on all sorts of false beliefs about women's intellects and capabilities, not to mention a good deal even less noble. Those of us who think tolerance for homosexuality is a good thing think that old views to the contrary can't be defended successfully; that they rest on a mixture of prjudice and confusion...

If Bob had said "You should never tell anyone what to do" then there would be logical trouble in the neighborhood. But that doesn't seem to be the best way to understand what he's is saying. More plausibly his point is that John is trying to impose his own tastes, and that (in the normal course of things) he's not entitled to do that. When Bob points this out, it isn't a matter of trying to impose his mere personal preferences on John, and Bob's complaint needn't be the bare fact that John is trying to tell him what to do. It's that John is trying to tell him what to do in a case where he has no business doing so. Bob's obvious reply is something like this: "I'm not saying it would never be okay for you to tell me what to do. I'm saying that this isn't one of those times. And it is okay for me or anyone else to remind you when you're stepping over the line, just as it would be okay for you to remind me if that's what I were doing."

My first thought is that "public property" doesn't mean "property not subject to the rule of law." The National Mall in Washington is "public property" but there are all sorts of thing I'm forbidden by law to do there, whether they harm anyone or not. Public property usually means property that's not privately owned but is under governmental jurisdiction. If we discovered some no-man's land that somehow fell between the cracks of all national boundaries, this wouldn't be public property and might fall outside all legal jurisdiction. (And if ordinary international law would apply, we could fancifully imagine making our way to some otherwise uninhabited planet.) As for the train, it's almost certainly either public property, i.e., falls under some governmental jurisdiction (say, a subway train in New York) or else it's private property, owned by whomever owns the railroad. In the former case, any relevant laws apply; in the latter, the owners get to set the rules, within the bounds of federal...

One thing is clear: if everyone downloaded for free, content producers wouldnt be able to profit from their labor. One reason why I don't downloaded pirated music, movies, etc. is that I think filmakers, musicians, etc. should be able to make money by doing what they do, and I can't see what's so special about me that I should be entitled to benefit for free from what they do. That's a long-winded way of saying I think it would be wrong for me to download pirated copies. Even though the filmaker would never get Freddy Freeloader's money, if. All did as Freddy does, the filmaker would suffer and in the long run, so would we all. Having said this, I think there's an awful lot wrong with contemporary copyright and intellectual property law. It could even be (though I'm not in a position to say so) that copyright law as it stands does as much harm as good. It could even be (though I doubt it) that we'd be better off if there were no intellectual property laws and we just depended on people's sense...

An interesting question. Without trying to settle the issues you use to raise your question, I'd suggest that there's no sure-fire method to be had here, and that while philosophers have things to contribute, they don't have any sort of magic wand. Ethical conundrums come up when different ways of looking at an ethical question suggest different and incompatible answers, and when the different approaches have some serious plausibility. Many people will agree: there's something to the idea that a woman who wants the Plan B medication ought, other things being equal, to be able to get it. But many of those same people will agree that in general, people shouldn't need to violate their consciences to practice otherwise respectable professions. Put briefly, both sides have plausible starting points. This is true of a good many serious disagreements, ethical or otherwise: the right answer isn't obvious, and different answers are prima facie plausible enough to be taken seriously. So what do...