Do you think that women can sign away their reproductive rights? Let's say man really hates abortion, and refuses to have sex with his partner unless she agrees to never abort any fetus of his. The woman agrees, and the two sign a "no abortions" agreement. Is she morally obligated to fulfill this agreement? Should the law force her to honor this agreement?

How can the diameter of a rainbow be measured?

Is it possible for two people to love each other without meeting? For example if two people were to meet on the Internet and fall in "love". Scientifically speaking love is based on pheromones and physical attraction so how can one love someone when physical and chemical attraction is taken out of the picture? According to scientists it should not be possible yet people claim that it happens all the time.

I guess there is the following difference between ordinal and cardinal numbers: while zero is a cardinal number, there is no ordinal number that corresponds to it: it makes no sense to talk about a (or the) "zeroth" something. Curiously enough, I think that there are many occasions where it is meaningful to talk about negative ordinal numbers. If I am considering a sequence of weeks, for instance, and only the weeks after some moment have some relevant feature, it will probably be reasonable to number those weeks with positive ordinals and to numer the previous weeks with negative ordinals. What do you think?

This is a twist on the "If a tree falls in the woods" question: Certainly there lived in the past a person, but the person in question has some very typical attributes: Nothing was written about or by this person. The person in question made no lasting contributions or left any tangible artifacts. No-one living has any memory of this person, nor are there any stories, legends, or tales being told. Did this person ever exist even with no known qualities, age, timeframe, or attribute other than "a human in the past?" There may well have been the faceless masses that are written about and populate historical accounts and ancient Greek plays, but what about specific but unspecified persons? They must have existed, but did they exist as individuals or only as a type?

As a vegetarian, when I consider the prospect of having a child I must ask myself whether to bring her up on the same diet as mine. I have met people who resentfully continue to be vegetarians because their parents brought them up that way and they could never ingest meat properly. Is it fair for parents to treat a child in this way and would you answer that question differently if the majority of adults, but not children, had freely chosen to be vegetarians and were now asking themselves the same question?

As an individual that feels a sense of 'alienation' and a lack of meaning in the world, I still feel obliged to confer some kind of meaning to my own life to keep living a productive and composed life. However, existential thoughts about the possibility of not having existed before, then coming onto the stage of life and being confronted with a vivid reality and possessing tools to understand it and the imperative to act upon it while taking it to be the only reality one can ever understand, and then facing the paradoxical nature of death that will seemingly completely extinguish this effort and the identity of the individual, can be the most shocking and anxiety producing thoughts. Such thoughts makes it extremely challenging for an individual to find a sense of incontrovertible meaning that dissolves such contradictory thoughts (like the above) and also provide true meaning for the individual to act productively in their environment. How does one cope with this kind of a human condition?

APOLOGIES FOR HISTORICAL EVENTS I have been concerned in recent years about the tendency of governments and other bodies to apologise for shameful events perpetrated by their predecessors. Instances that spring to mind are the Australian government's apology to the aboriginal population for their previous maltreatment, the British government's apology to the descendants of First World War servicemen shot for cowardice, and most recently, the British Prime Minister's apology to people who were displaced and sent to Australia as children to lives of abuse and hardship. The first thing that springs to my mind is that it's easy to apologise for something that you personally had no part in. It seems to me that it is most likely done for political enhancement rather than true remorse. Surely the only people who could legitimately apologise are those who perpetrated the act, and if they are long dead, then the time for true apologies has expired. The fact that the recipients of these apologies (usually the...

My question is about how we can value religion from a secular perspective. When it comes to thinking about the religion of Islam for example, there are a multitude of ways to rate the religion's value (or lack there of). It is evident that Islam gives meaning and hope to billions of people, but at what cost? The end result is that the believer is left with a worldview that is erroneous in relation to history, science and the very meaning and purpose of life. Should we base our valuation of Islam upon how closely its teachings cohere to reality, or base it on how much the religion positively effects those who follow it?

I am doing a project for my philosophy class. When I google search for the ethically legitimate function of civil servants, I am finding zero. I am curious to find out if the code of conduct that civil servants follow applies to all professions (if there has every been just one code of conduct), also have these codes of conduct ever been revised. With more cultures and religious beliefs coming into play in society I am wondering if this has been addressed at all? Thank-You for your time, Becky J.