You ask: "morally speaking, can my action BE more serious or offensive only because other people see it so?

Suppose there was someone weird enough to think that your sleeping man would be indifferent between having his feet used to prop a window open and being raped in his sleep. And to make things clearer, suppose this person thinks that the sleeping man wouldn't mind either. It's hard to imagine the psychology of such a person, and may not even be clear if he would be a competent moral agent, but set that aside. What should we say?

Perhaps we would say that we shouldn't judge this person more harshly for doing one of these things rather than the other. No harm was meant; it's just that the person was massively, unimaginably clueless. This would be someone we should keep close watch over; if they actually carried out the rape, we would be fully justified in confining them in some way. We might abstain from moral judgments about the person himself, but there's another question we can ask: if the sleeping man was raped, is what happened to him worse than it would have been if he'd merely had his feet used as a window-stick?

It's a pretty safe bet that he would think so, and that matters. In fact it matters a lot. We don't count up harm or moral offense solely in the coin of bruises. A morally competent person knows that if someone would strongly prefer not to be treated in a certain way, that is, as far as it goes, a reason not to do it; not an all-things-considered reason, of course, but a reason that normally deserves to be taken into account. Indeed: if there's no weighty reason to ignore the person's strong preference, it will normally count as a decisive reason not to do so.

Why? I suppose a certain crude form of utilitarianism might make that look like a good question, though if it came to it it wouldn't be hard to conjure up consequentialist reasons not to rape sleeping people (let alone people who aren't asleep.) But set that aside. Part of what morality demands of us is that we respect the dignity of other people, and that we not treat them simply as means. Using someone's feet as a window stick without their consent is not a way to respect their dignity, and amounts to using them as a mere means, but raping them while asleep is so much further along both scales that to most people it will feel like a whole different kind of offense. To say that most people could be wrong about this would require a very special story to be believable. The example you've given doesn't promise one.

What makes things offensive is, no surprise, closely tied to what people find offensive. What makes something a violation is—again, no surprise, closely tied to what people would see as a violation if it happened to them. The link isn't inviolable, but it's not accidental either. It's difficult to make sense of the claim that something is not actually a violation or an offense even if most thoughtful, informed people would see it as such.

Now of course we sometimes work our way to moral insights that we once were blind to. Understanding the deep wrongness of slavery, for example, is such a case. This happens when people learn to see things that they had overlooked or ignored or turned away from. It's typically a matter of coming to see something from another's point of view. But that is exactly what's missing in the example you offer. In effect, we're asked to ignore the point of view of the person whose point of view seems prima facie most relevant.

You offer two reasons (though really it's three.)

The first is that if the government helps people (provides material support, in your phrase), it harms those people.

Is this true? It's quite possibly true sometimes,. But is it true by and large? You haven't offered any evidence, and I'm not convinced that there is any. In any case, when the government doesn't help people it's at least as plausible that at least some of the time, that results in harm. So even if both policies sometimes harm some people, that doesn't tell us which is worse.

But there's another problem internal to your argument. You're in favor of various kinds of aid, so long as it's not provided by the government. Presumably you're in favor of that at least partly because you think it can actually do good. But if private charity can do good and help people, it's not obvious that having the help come from the government can't do likewise.

Now there are questions here that philosophy alone can't answer: which kinds of aid programs, public or private, are most effective? And are they better or worse than no aid at all? Those are empirical questions. My admittedly non-expert reading of the evidence is that both sorts of aid can be beneficial and often are. But in any case, if one kind can be, it would be odd if the other couldn't.

You give another argument: public aid amounts to establishment of a state religion. However, all you offer in defense of this is an assertion: helping people in need is fundamentally a religious directive.

Why should we believe that? There are moral arguments for helping other people, but it's either arbitrary stipulation or confusion to claim that moral considerations automatically count as religious. And even if someone wants to stretch the word "religion" in this way, that doesn't settle the First Amendment question. For that purpose, the issue isn't what someone might decide to mean by the word "religion." It's what it means in the First Amendment. It's beyond doubtful that the Framers intended to count all moral considerations as religious, thereby ruling out broad moral considerations as legitimate grounds for legislation. What's pretty clear is that the Framers were concerned with religion more or less as we ordinarily think of it. And as we ordinarily think of religion, believing that murder is wrong isn't enough to make someone religious.

Your second major argument is an appeal to a kind of libertarian argument: while we're individually obliged to help people, we can't take people's money by threat of violence and use it for the benefit of others.

For that line to be persuasive, the analogy between government programs and holding someone up at gunpoint to get their money for Granny's good has to be a sound one. When you put it the way I just did, however, it seems a little less than convincing.

I'd be prepared to go further. I think that part of what the analogy rests on is a doubtful view about what's "yours" or "mine" in the first place. What you own you own against the background of a large and complicated social scheme. There's no straightforward fact of the matter about what "really" belongs to you and what doesn't. Your claim about how we should or shouldn't treat people and their money is a moral claim. There's nothing wrong with that; the questions here are in large part moral ones. But since you're appealing to a moral notion of property rights, you need a moral argument that's a lot more detailed and careful than the analogy with robbery (or Robin-Hoodery...)

There are deep, serious and important questions about the proper limits of government. There are serious arguments to be made that lean libertarian, and there are equally serious arguments that tend in quite the opposite direction. This comment—already too long—isn't the place to sort all this out. My plea really comes down to this simple thought: there really is a serious issue here, and engaging it will call for going beyond slogans and problematic analogies. There's too much at stake for that.

Great response. I would add that since the 17th century, theology as a discipline has largely been seen as distinct from philosophy. Theology, though, historically and today, has drawn from philosophy and philosophers (throughout its history) have addressed religiously significant themes. Philosophy of religion is a respected sub-field of philosophy (see the entry Philosophy of Religion in the free online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) just like philosophy of science, philosophy of art, and so on. There is also the practice of what is called philosophical theology --this is usually a matter of practicing philosophy within a tradition. In this sense a Christian philosopher might offer a philosophical analysis of the Trinity or Incarnation or Prayer.

There are two sorts of issues here. Let's start with the one that I think underlies your discomfort.

The fact that something is my goal may matter to me, but that doesn't make it intrinsically valuable. Indeed, it might be intrinsically horrid. If someone's goal is to brutally torture an innocent child to death (writing those words actually makes me shudder, but that's part of the point) then their goal is the very opposite of intrinsically valuable, and the fact that they would value achieving it makes them evil without adding an iota of value to their "achievement." In a nutshell: the fact that I value something doesn't entail that what I value is valuable. Whether an "achievement" is valuable isn't a matter of whether someone values it, but of what the achievement itself amounts to.

There might seem to be a utilitarian argument to the contrary: the pleasure the sadist gets from his cruelty adds to the sum total of happiness in the world. But all this really shows is that a certain version of utilitarianism is morally confused. Suppose that through sheer accident, an innocent person dies a horrible death. And suppose that Sam the sadist takes enormous pleasure in this fact, even though he did nothing to bring it about. Anyone who thinks the world is a little better overall than it would have been if Sam had remained ignorant of the tragedy and not taken pleasure in it is someone whose moral instincts I wouldn't trust for a moment. Pleasure is not always good; sometimes it's evil. And likewise, achievements are not always good; sometimes they're vile.

However, all of what's been said so far relies on understanding benefit morally. I've read "intrinsically valuable" as a matter of moral worth. But there is a morally neutral use of the word "benefit"; that's just a fact about how we speak. People clearly can benefit in this narrow sense from ill-gotten gains. It would be strange to say that thieves never benefit in any sense from their theft. If we prescind from the moral sense of "benefit," it would be hard to make the case that someone who commits a terrible act can't benefit in any sense at all. The very phrase "ill-gotten gains" makes the point; what's ill-gotten can still be a gain.

However, this raises a new thought. Acts of cruelty or injustice may serve my narrow ends, and in that sense, they may be to my benefit, but they make me worse. And one might think that there's some way of doing the arithmetic that allows us to ask whether on balance a terrible act can be to one's benefit—whether the selfish "benefit" will inevitably be outweighed by the moral cost. My first inclination is to say that there's no need to crack this nut, but that may be too quick. The distinction between moral and non-moral goods is almost certainly not as simple as the distinction between two independent dimensions on a graph.

There could be a picture of an X that is itself an X. For example, there could be a minimalist picture of a square that is itself a square. The picture could even be titled in such a way that it is or is meant to be a picture of itself, so that this square is a picture of this square. But in general a picture of X is, obviously, not X. A picture of a unicorn is an oil painting, say, and an oil painting is not a unicorn. The famous portrait of the Duke of Wellington by Arthur Lawrence (1815-1816) is most certainly not the Duke of Wellington himself. It has outlived him for by a longtime, for example. We can of course say, looking at the portrait, 'Oh look, there's the Duke of Wellington. I can see why they called him the Iron Duke.' There is a difficult and interesting question about depiction, and how to construe the first of these statements. It cannot mean,

'Oh look, there is a picture of the Duke of Wellington.'

This is an observation about a picture in a material sense, gold frame and all.
Nor can the statement mean,

'Oh look, there is the Duke of Wellington, in a picture.'

Of course the Duke of Wellington could be sitting in a hole in the canvas, so that he is literally in a picture, and it could even be the Lawrence portrait. Nor can the statement mean that the picture resembles the Duke of Wellington, since the Iron Duke really wasn't two-dimensional or made of paint and canvas. There are far too many respects in which the picture actively fails to resemble the Duke for there to be any sort of overall resemblance. There is the fact that the Duke had legs, and the portrait has none, and a million others of the same sort. In the same way, the visual experience I have when I see the portrait is not the same as the one I would have had had I seen the Duke himself. It would be only in very special circumstances that I might mistake the portrait for the Duke, an unlikely mistake anyway since I know that he died in 1852.

You've given an apparently powerful reason for thinking that it's morally acceptable to have a military to defend the nation: lives will be saved. You've implicitly cast this in terms of defense. That is, you've implicitly offered a justification for having an army by appeal to the right of a nation to defend its citizens. It's plausible that having no military would lead to more deaths than having one. And it's morally plausible that people—and nations—have a right to self-defense. And so this raises an obvious question: what reasons are left for thinking that military service is immoral?

There may be reasons. But you've shifted the burden onto yourself. If you want your view to be taken seriously, then you have to say more. If you leave the argument where it is, then you're open to the charge that you hold your position in bad faith.

Are there reasons to the contrary? You could try to show that having armies leads in the long run to more deaths. Or you could try to argue that it's always wrong to kill anyone deliberately, even in self-defense. There may be other arguments you could attempt. But you need to answer your own objections.

The question of whether this sounds forced or not is a hard one to make a judgment about, but the answer, as I understand it, is pretty much the one you've heard. If one prays to a saint, one is asking the saint to intercede; not to perform the miracle. Although we might say loosely that a saint "performed a miracle," the saint has no powers over nature of his/her own and if a miracle occurs, the source of the miracle is God.

This isn't to suggest that your question is a bad one. Why bother, one might ask, with this circuitous route? After all, God (assuming there is a God) hears the prayer, knows what the petitioner want, and grants the request or not—even if the petitioner addressed the request to a saint.

Perhaps a panelist with a deeper understanding of Catholic tradition can chime in, but Catholicism has a genius for appealing to the religious imagination of its adherents. And since religion is at least as much a matter of the heart as of the mind, one can imagine an argument to the effect that God, understanding full well that humans are like this, created the order of things in a way that takes account of the human heart and not just the mind. That, however, is a gesture at an answer rather than a piece of theology, and in any case, a gesture that amounts to a guess by someone who's not part of the tradition you're asking about.

There is a well-known equivocation on "nothing" here. According to quantum theory, there are two particles that go in and out of existence, and leave behind "something". You might as well argue that when I win a trick in bridge, my score came from nothing because the trick disappeared into the "book" (the pile of tricks I needed to make") afterwards. How are two particles interacting "nothing"? Besides, there is also the structure of the sea of quantum gravity, with fluctuations. Is a sea nothing? Is a fluctuation nothing? The fluctuation in the sea of quantum gravity is a most definite something. No, when in metaphysics we talk about something coming from nothing, the nothing has to be a pukka nothing - absolutely nothing at all, and not just a vacuum, for example, which has a structure and is therefore not nothing, but merely not air.