Here's a way that might help. Suppose there are two pieces of paper in front of you. One of them is a genuine $5 bill. The other is a perfect counterfeit. In fact, suppose that it was illicitly created by the very same equipment that created the real bill. The point is that the difference between the real $5 bill and the fake isn't a matter of the physical properties of the piece of paper.

A similar point holds for the home run. There are certain things that have to happen physically for something to amount to a home run. But with a little imagination, we can tell a story on which what's "really" going on has nothing to do with baseball. It just looks for all the world like a real baseball game. But to be a home run, the physical events have to be part of an honest-to-Babe-Ruth baseball game. Without the right intentions, rule-following, etc., no set of physical events amounts to a baseball game. There are physical regularities in a baseball game, but some of the most important things have to do with explicitly, intentionally, following a set of rules or norms.

Does this mean that there's something spooky about signing checks and playing baseball? I don't think that's the intent—or at least it shouldn't be, Physics has lots to say about the physics of spheres colliding with bats and so on. But physics has nothing to say about stolen bases, designated hitters, and the like.

Also: while it may be true that the immediate physical facts about the ongoing events in the stadium don't make something a home run, facts about baseball "supervene" on broadly physical facts. The difference between a real home run and something that merely looks like one may not be found in the physical properties of what's going on in the moment. But it's pretty plausible that there can't be a difference between a real home run and something that just looks like one unless there is some physical difference somewhere in the history of what's going on right now. Even if some of the things that make home runs home runs have to do with minds, it doesn't follow that mental facts float free of physical facts.

That said, and I assume this is somewhere in the ballpark (heh...) of Prinkard's point, no amount of sheerly physics-y knowledge will add up to an understanding of baseball. Or paying a bill. Or meaning what you say. Prinkard is pointing to the way that norms, rules and practices enter into making certain things and events that things and events they are.

When I was a young man, I knew someone who was, in the phrase that might have been used at that time, "mildly retarded." He was married. And he understood his condition. And he struck me as a happy man. He certainly wasn't leading a life of misery.

In the neighborhood where I now live, there is a young man who is even more intellectually challenged. I doubt that he understands his condition. But he does not strike me as unhappy at all. To be sure, he lives a simple life. And no: he couldn't live on his own. And he also won't have "accomplishments" in the sense you have in mind. But near as I can tell, he's not miserable at all. He's happy. In his case, I don't think marriage is an issue. But the larger point is the important one: intellectual ability and happiness are quite different things. There are sad, miserable geniuses and thriving, happy people whose IQ scores are well below 100.

So what I'm saying is that I don't accept the premise of your question.

If the woman meant (a) "I can't utter the word no in response to any request from you," then she can't abide by her companion's request (to say "no") without falsifying what she has just said. Still, I agree with you that there's no paradox here. The woman can abide by the request to say "no" by saying "no" in response to it. As far as I can see, the appearance of paradox depends on supposing that the woman meant both (a) and also (b) "I can't deny any request from you." But, as you suggest, she can't have meant both (a) and (b). All that follows is that (a) and (b) can't both be true if her companion asks her to say "no." Nothing especially interesting about that.

There is something going on in your interesting question that is other than the distinction between a positive legal justice, and another “social” or perhaps even natural or transcendental justice, behind the positive law. The reason is that it is also possible to say, exactly as you did, that the US legal system has been designed to try to get us justice, we hope, where and when it is to be had and to the extent that it can be had. We can say that what the legal system gives us is not always perfect justice for all parties, as one might very well think in the Cosby case, for obvious reasons. There were over fifty allegations made against Cosby, in addition to the ones that resulted in the cases leading to Cosby’s convictions in Pennsylvania. The mountain of indirect and other evidence is more than enough to convince reasonable people that Cosby should indeed have been convicted on at least some of the charges that were overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2021. But the Court took into account the fact that the Attorney General of Pennsylvania had promised Cosby that there would be no criminal prosecution if Cosby would testify in a civil lawsuit, which Cosby did. The Attorney General then prosecuted Cosby anyway, using some of the testimony from the civil case. What six out of seven of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices found was that Cosby's due process rights had been violated as a result. The evidence from the civil case amounted to a kind of self-incrimination. The Court’s finding is not in itself an unreasonable one, and the purpose of due process protections is also a reasonable one, as it serves justice according to the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution and other resulting provisions. So justice was done in this case, it could be said, and the CNN commentator was wrong. It could also be said that Cosby escaped on a “merely” procedural issue. In some of the other allegations against Cosby in other States the issue was a statute of limitations, which is also procedural. (We should not slide from "procedural" to "merely procedural" and then to "unimportant, trivial, and having nothing to do with justice.") So the justice that should have been delivered was not delivered, a very serious matter indeed. But as the law stands the due process violations were enough to counterbalance the probable outcome. The decision to respect that balance was made in the interests of justice and the existence of a fair and universal functioning judicial system. So what we have overall is a wider justice in the case, representing a success for the judicial system, but an almost intolerable injustice in the narrower sense. That is the moral, I think. The wider and narrower considerations of justice must both be considered. It can often be tempting to wish that the narrower considerations would in some particular case override the requirements of the overall judicial system, but that could be a mistake, unless the procedural commitments of the system are themselves unjust. It also occurs to me that a special rule to override procedural balances could be contemplated for exceptional cases of a manifest injustice, but it would be a nightmare to write, even if the effort were very well-motivated, and even if the rule turned out to be unconstitutional in the end.

The first point is that "Is it natural?" and "Is it wrong?" aren't the same question. We could spend a lot of time on what it means to call something "natural," but you seem to have something like this in mind: if there are species that do it routinely, then it's natural. If that made things acceptable, then the fact that in some species, the female kills the male after sex would mean that it would be okay for a woman to kill a man after having sex with him. Don't know about you, but I'd say that seems like a pretty good counterexample to the "It's natural, therefore it's okay" idea.

As for why eating animals might be wrong, I dare say you've heard many of the reasons that some people find persuasive. Some have to do with the consequences for the animals. Others are of a quite different sort. For example: our meat-eating habits are a significant contributor to global warming. Raising animals for food accounts for just under 15% of greenhouse gases. See

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/30/dining/climate-change-foo...

for example. Eating meat is also hard on the environment in other ways. Here's a link to a piece in The Guardian that covers some of the details:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/07/true-cost-of-eating-meat-en...

It's "natural" for humans to eat meat in the sense that we're an omnivorous species. But we have a choice, and lots of people lead healthy, happy lives without eating meat. Whether the considerations about treatment of animals, climate change and other effects on the environment are reason enough to give up eating meat is something you can decide for yourself. But there are serious reasons on the anti-meat-eating side, and the fact that some animals are carnivorous doesn't get us anywhere in answering the question.

If a paradox resulted whenever one thing had more than one name, then these paradoxes wouldn't be restricted to sets. The names 'Samuel Clemens' and 'Mark Twain' would generate a paradox by referring to the same person. But, of course, there's no paradox here. Everything true of the person named 'Samuel Clemens' is true of the person named 'Mark Twain'. Mark Twain was born in Missouri, and Samuel Clemens wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Indeed, all those who know that Mark Twain wrote the novel thereby also know de re (Latin for 'concerning the thing') that Samuel Clemens wrote the novel: they know, concerning the person denoted by 'Samuel Clemens', that he wrote the novel, even if they wouldn't use 'Samuel Clemens' to denote the author.

Like my colleague, I agree that you've put your finger on a potential moral problem with necrophilia. However, I have a worry about the rest of his analysis. My colleague writes: "I think the more primordial objection to necrophilia is that most of us see the good of sexual intimacy as the loving union of two persons." I certainly don't disagree that this is a good of sexual intimacy, but aside from the question of whether it's the good, I have a different worry: even if the loving union of two people is the good of sexual intimacy, it wouldn't follow that other forms of sexual activity are morally suspect. The most obvious case is masturbation. I've never seen anything that struck me as a plausible argument that masturbation is wrong. A standard Catholic objection is that all sex acts should be "open to the possibility of procreation," as some Vatican documents put it. My own view is that this is bad as theology, and worse if one doesn't accept theological premises. Another objection is that it's a special case of using someone—oneself in this case— as a mere means, and thereby not respecting their humanity. I think the right reply is that people masturbate, among other reasons, because it feels good, and for the release it brings, and it's a highly implausible stretch to say that people who masturbate don't respect themselves. And so if there's something morally wrong with necrophilia apart from the possible consequences for the wishes of living people, we'll need a different account.

Suppose it turned out that the practice of necrophilia tended to undermine one's ability to form relationships (not necessarily just sexual relationships) with other people. Suppose it tended to desensitize people who practice it in ways that undermine their moral sensitivity. I don't know whether this is true, and I don't think my hunches are worth anything. But certain habits and practices surely do tend to diminish one's moral responses, and if necrophilia is one of them, that would be a problem. But I stress: I don't pretend to know that this is true.

Another potential problem is that someone seeking out the opportunity to have sex with a corpse may very well need to cross other boundaries just to bring the situation about—breaking into a morgue, for example.

My first thought when I read your question, however, wasn't about the moral wrongness of necrophilia but about what Aristotle called eudaimonia—with human flourishing. I wonder whether someone who practices necrophilia is likely to be stunted in other ways. It's not altogether easy to see necrophilia fitting into an otherwise thriving psychology. One again, I don't think my mere intuitions here are worth much, but it's hard simply to set those intuitions aside.

Indeed, I think that one objection to necrophelia would, indeed, be that this might involve the violation of the wishes of the one who has died, but of course we can imagine a case in which a person's dying wish is that someone sexually use their body after they have died. I think the more primordial objection to necrophelia is that most of us see the good of sexual intimacy as the loving union of two persons. After death, most of us think that the dead body is a corpse and no longer a person. In the sexual act, the living person is not having intercourse with Pat (non-gender specific name) but with Pat's remains.
A qualification may be in order: there are philosophers who are sometimes called animalists who entertain the view that at death you still exist as long as your body endures in tact. Personally, I think that reveals a problem with animalism. They wind up viewing death as a qualitative change, whereas (intuitively) most of us see death as a substantial change, e.g. in a funeral, you are not burying Pat, but Pat's corpse.

Einstein gets credit for relativity, but (in spite of his having been a patent clerk) not a patent. Not all innovations are patentable, and in the sciences, philosophy, history... this is a very good thing. If something is patented, then others typically have to pay to use it. That’s not what we want for scientific or philosophical ideas.

What you seem more concerned about is credit, and there the answer is usually straightforward. The person who publishes the idea first generally gets credit. What credit means is just that it will be acknowledged by others that the person getting the credit is the originator of the idea.

But remember that few ideas are thoroughly original, that sometimes a larger idea can be “in the air,” so to speak, with more than one person coming up with a version, and that even if Jo Blow gets “credit,” that doesn’t mean her contribution will end up being the most important; how others develop the idea may be what ends up mattering most.

If you think you have an original philosophical idea, the general advice would be to try getting it published in a philosophy journal. But be warned: the process of getting something accepted for publication is very rigorous. Among other things, the referees will ask themselves whether what you’re saying actually is a new contribution (and trust me: there’s a good chance that it isn’t.) They will also go over the arguments for your thesis with a fine-tooth comb. And they will pay close attention to whether your article makes appropriate contact with the larger philosophical literature. There’s a reason why most published philosophy is written by people who spent years learning their craft.