Yes, you interpret correctly.

It is surely possible that a person's music reflects his or her personality and self, and possible that, by listening to this music, you gain insight and understanding of him or her as a person. But I would be very reluctant simply to assume that this is so. Here are three reasons why. First, the inference from artwork to artist's personality is hardly straightforward. It is rarely true that only a very specific kind of person could possibly have produced a certain set of artworks. And there is little reason to believe that we are good at tracing whatever such connections there may be. I have often been stunned at seeing an artist I greatly admired say silly things in interviews, often including silly things about his or her own artworks. Second, we live in a world of commerialized art, where a single popular song can pull in millions of dollars. A great deal of money is therefore spent on fine-tuning songs to fit a certain free-spending segment of the audience. To put it bluntly, many an...

Human beings can and do change. They may lack important attributes at one time and yet come to possess them later. So we must choose whether to tie the ascription of humanity in the relevant sense to attributes they have or to ones they can have. Your formulations go back and forth between these options. I think we should choose the latter option. Only if we do can we firmly include infants and small children within the domain of humanity and human rights. Moreover, we should guard against our susceptibility to error, esp. when we feel anger and hostility. We should avoid demonizing those we hold in contempt, we should honor our own humanity by treating them humanely rather than as beasts that may be subjected to any imaginable form of torture and degradation. (The possibilities of error and demonization are amply and shockingly exemplified in the horrors committed in Abu Ghraib.) If their humanity can emerge at all, this is most likely to happen through treating them humanely, not through...

That something much worse exists does not make a bad thing less bad. But it may well make you feel much less bad about it. And that's what a consolation is, really: something that makes you feel less bad. In this case, this can be achieved by gaining a broader perspective: by seeing the wrong you suffered in comparison to other wrongs (and, I might add, also in comparison to all the good times you have had, and will have again, with your sister). However big and irreparable the hurt felt at the time, it's really just a blip on a larger canvas.

The indicated difference often concerns merely where it is being done: in a political science department or in a philosophy department. Other than that, "political theory" is often used for more historical works of exposition and interpretation (say, of the writings of Locke or Rousseau), while "political philosophy" is used for works that defend or critically engage with a normative view (even a historical one). In this sense, Quentin Skinner might be a paradigm political theorist and John Rawls a paradigm political philosopher; but the distinction cannot be sharply drawn.

Your reasoning appeals to a false dichotomy. You assume that either we give monopoly pricing powers to inventors and thereby effectively deny access to recent drugs to poor patients or we allow generic companies to compete and thereby effective deprive inventors of their rewards and of funds for new research ventures. But there are further options. One would be to allow generic companies to compete immediately (thereby reducing the price of a new medicine to near the marginal cost of production) and then to reward inventors in another way, for example with a reward (out of public funds) proportioned to the impact of their invention on the global disease burden. All patients would benefit for much cheaper access to recent drugs, and taxpayers would pay a little more. Millions of lives would be saved through this innovation -- not merely because poor patients get access to cutting-edge drugs, but also because biotech and pharma companies would gain an incentive to research remedies for the...

Agreed, the bumper sticker has very little persuasive appeal to those it purports to be addressing. But something could be said against your more general point, as follows. Suppose someone believes that abortion is morally (roughly) on a par with infanticide and murder, and also that infanticide and murder are terrible crimes that ought to be criminalized and punished severely. Would it be incoherent for such a person also to hold that the criminal law should not interfere with any woman's decision about whether to have an abortion or not? One could hold these two views together -- in fact, Mario Cuomo held them together when he was governor of New York State. One could rationalize the combination like this: "I am convinced that abortion is murder. But the grounds of my conviction are rooted in a religion that many of my fellow citizens do not share. In fact, my country is deeply divided on the issue of abortion, with many reasonable persons on either side. Under such circumstances, it would...

Such conditions or expectations would not be wrong when giving money to a friend or colleague. Seeing the holes in her shabby sweater, you might give her some money and ask her to buy a new sweater with it. And you would then expect that, if she accepts the gift, she will use it the way you stipulated. So why should matters be different with a homeless person? The obvious answer is: because you owe him support. OK, you don't owe support to every homeless person, but you do have an obligation to do something to support some of them. And because it's an obligation, you may not attach conditions or expectations -- just as, when you own money to your landlady, you may not attach conditions or expectations regarding how she should spend your payment. I am not convinced by this line of argument. I accept that we have an obligation to support the homeless. This includes an obligation to help them meet their basic needs (esp. when our society is doing too little on this score). But it does not include...

Suicide is outlawed in different societies and epochs for all sorts of different reasons. These fall broadly into three categories: to enforce religious commands, to protect persons from themselves, and to protect persons other than the would-be suicide. Are these good reasons to outlaw suicide? Reasons in the first category are not acceptable in modern democratic societies (and, in the US, violate the First-Amendment separation of church and state). Those in the majority must not impose their religion on their fellow citizens. Reasons in the second category -- so-called paternalistic (or parentalistic) reasons -- can be plausible. It is a good thing that the police can stop the attempted suicide of a young man who is in despair after his lover broke up with him. Chances are he'll get over it and fall in love again, even if this now seems inconceivable to him. But what if, a year or two later, the man still judges his life not worth living and wants to die? Who are we to overrule his...

Christianity emphasizes foregiveness, mercy, and charity as a much-needed counterweight to human selfishness (the wide-spread human tendency to give much more weight to one's own perspective and interests than to those of other people). As your question brings out, this Christian emphasis on foregiveness, mercy, and charity can have morally dubious effects when third parties enter the picture. If a rape victim, rather than press charges, forgives her rapist, she may well thereby be increasing the risk other women will face from the same man. If (to use your example) we continue to channel foreign aid moneys through a ruler who has embezzled lots of such aid before, we are harming the poor in his country whom we ought to protect from poverty and disease. Yes, one should be sensitive to the perspective and interests of the rapist and the ruler. But one should certainly also be sensitive -- much more sensitive, in fact -- to the perspective and interests of potential future rape victims and of...