I hear two things in what you say. One is that, quite understandably, you want to deal with your sorrow. The other is that you want a "serious, fair and moral" way past your situation. But I'm not sure these amount to the same thing. When it comes to curing heartache, philosophers have no special expertise. A philosopher could offer you some obvious platitudes, including the suggestion that if you are really having trouble coping, there's no shame in seeking professional help, but a philosopher is not a doctor of the soul On the other part of your plea, there may be a bit that a philosopher could say. You've accepted — intellectually, at least — that your former fiancé has lost her regard for you and that this is something you brought on your self. She is entitled to get on with her life, and the right thing to do is to respect that. But you're also looking for some way to atone and make amends. Making amends may not be possible, because making amends isn't the sort of thing that can just...

Many philosophers (and many non-philosophers, for that matter) think that whether something is right of wrong is at least partly a matter of consequences. If smoking were good for people, it might be a good thing to encourage them to do it. Since smoking is unhealthy, it's wrong to encourage it. More generally, it looks like you're assuming something doubtful: that whether something is right or wrong is always something about the thing itself. That's what I take your point about the connection between promiscuity and disease to be. You seem to be saying that if promiscuity really is wrong, it must be because of something about its very nature rather than something about the consequences of being promiscuous. But why would we think that? A couple of caveats. First, thinking about consequences isn't simple. In the case of promiscuity, for example, there are many kinds of consequences we might want to take into account, and some of them -- how our way of living general affects our relationships...

I'm going to stick with the first bit: how could making an offer be exploitation? Suppose I seek out someone in desperate circumstances and make them an offer that I know they can't afford to refuse but that I also know isn't fair and that they would never take if they weren't so desperate. I am taking deliberately taking advantage of their dire circumstances. That's exploitation. There's room to argue about cases, but the general idea seems clear enough.

I can't speak to the legal implications, but it seems pretty clear that you should be honest with them. If you can persuade them that in spite of your trip there, you have what they want, they may be persuaded. But it's hard to see what excuse there could be for not being truthful

My co-panelists who specialize in such matters may have more insight than I, but I would have thought the reply would be this: the idea that something could really be right and yet its rightness should provide no motive for doing it is incoherent. "Rightness," so the argument would go, is conceptually connected to motivation. If that's correct (I'm not offering a view on that, by the way), then there doesn't seem to be any room for the idea of "almost right" as you explicate it. There's no obvious way to distinguish the "almost right" from the "almost wrong." (Is murder "almost wrong" even though not wrong? What does that mean if the almost-wrongness doesn't provide a motive for avoiding it?) And so to assess your proposal, we'd need to know quite a bit more what sort of facts "almost-rightness" and "almost-wrongness" are meant to be.

It's a lovely question. Let me start by recommending a couple of things to read. One is Bernard Williams' classic paper "The Makropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality" (in his book Moral Luck .) Another is Larry Temkin's paper "Is Living Longer Living Better?" (in Journal of Applied Philosophy , 2008.) One of the interesting things about Temkin's paper is that he believes the question isn't merely idle. He believes there is at least a serious chance that we might learn to halt the aging process. Be that as it may, let me raise one issue among the various possible ones. It may seem that living forever would be an unmitigated good. But Williams argues forcefully that this isn't so. His argument has two parts, but I want to note just one of them: if we lived more or less as we find ourselves now, then eventually life would become unutterably boring. The title of his essay is taken from a play in which a woman (Elena Makropoulos) has been given a potion that lets her live...

Just one footnote to Sean. If homosexuality is a choice, it's not, as Richard Mohr once pointed out, like the choice of what sort of ice cream you're going to buy. Here's a thought experiment to try. Think of someone you find sexually attractive. Now try to choose not to have that response. Part two: think of someone you don't find sexually attractive. Now try to choose to be attracted to them. Step three: repeat steps one and two for broad categories of people where you find you have pretty stable patterns of attraction. If you are anything like me, you'll find that the attempt to choose doesn't get you anywhere. Just how we end up being sexually attracted to the people we're attracted to is not easy to say. What seems pretty clear is that it's not in any ordinary sense a choice, Of course, having predilections is one thing; that may not be a choice. Acting on them is another; that usually is a choice. If a case could be made that it's wrong for homosexual people to act on their...

Lack of consent isn't the only argument, but I doubt that anyone ever thought it was. Roughly, we think we need consent when we think the person might reasonably object if they only knew about or understood what was being done to them. In the case of pedophilia, there's plenty of reason to think that the child would object if s/he understood. As it happens, I know someone very well who was the victim of a pedophile. When it happened (and it happened more than once), she didn't understand; she was four years old. But if you asked her about it now, she would say that what this man did to her was very wrong and caused her a great deal of torment as she came to terms with it. Though it's hardly the whole story, the phrase "taking advantage of" is entirely apt here.. This man didn't have that young girl's good in mind. He was using her for his own disagreeable reasons. It's a straightforward case of what Kant would call using someone as a mere means. Offhand, I can't think of any cases where...

Let me start by saying that on any plausible scenario, I agree with Prof. Smith. There are plenty of good grounds -- he offers three excellent ones -- for thinking that sacrificing your children to the gods is really just wrong, period. The fact that some people think otherwise doesn't by itself amount to a reason for doubting this. (In fact, this is one of the points that trips people up when they think about moral relativism. They forget that mere disagreement isn't a reason for taking both sides to have equally good reasons or equally plausible beliefs.) But I'd like to probe a wee bit further, because there is a sticky little point here worth exploring. I may think someone is horribly wrong without thinking they are to be condemned morally . Suppose someone deeply and sincerely believes that casting a spell rather than a blood transfusion will save their child's life. I think they are wildly, tragically wrong, but I have a very different moral evaluation of them than of someone who, say,...

Interesting question, but the illusion here is to think that atheists face any special problem. Let's take the issues in turn. On morality: suppose God exists. How would that make morality objective? Someone might think that if God commands something, that makes it morally right. But it's long been pointed out (at least since Plato's Euthyphro ) that this way of thinking about things is problem-ridden. What if God commanded torturing all blue-eyed babies? Would that make it right? Hard to see why anyone should agree. Someone might say that God would never command any such thing. But why not? Presumably because God, if there is one, doesn't command evil deeds. In fact, if the theist wants to make sense of the idea that God is praiseworthy partly because he is good, there will have to be a standard of good and bad, right and wrong, separate from what God happens to will. This may still leave it puzzling how there can be objective moral truths. That's too big an issue to tackle here, but it...