Given that reasonable people disagree whether abortion is murder, how can someone who truly examines their own opinion fail to choose either 'life begins at conception' or abortion should be legal in all cases? While it is conceptually difficult to rationalize that a zygote or embryo is a human life and should be afforded all rights due, it is equally difficult and, in fact likely, more abhorrent to say that human life doesn't begin until a fetus exits and is severed physically from the mother's body. Isn't any choice other than one of these two a complete failure to have any true belief?

Lets say a man points a gun at someone's head with the intent of killing that person. Pulls the trigger, but for some reason the gun doesn't work. His action would in this case have been the same whether the gun worked or not. So shouldn't attempted murder be judged just as severe as murder? Should a person be judged by the result of the person's actions, or the intent of the person's action?

Hi, Thanks for a fascinating site. One thing that I have often heard is that "You can't have rights without responsibilities", and I wondered if you could explain the reasoning behind that statement. Is it something that can be deduced using philosophy, or is it merely an assertion? Many thanks, Mark

When it comes to matters of law, are arguments for deterrence distinct from arguments about morality? Are practical concerns separate from moral judgment? It seems one thing to say "we should outlaw murder so as to prevent murder" and another to say "we should outlaw murder because it is wrong". -ace

Suppose some condition A is identical to some condition B; to be concise, let's write A=B. It seems obvious, then, that A is necessary and sufficient for B; or more compactly, A B. On the other hand, that implication's converse (i.e. that A B implies A=B) seems like it isn't right, because we can easily come up with counter-examples. Take my mother, for example; she is always saying, "eating spinach everyday is a necessary and sufficient condition for becoming strong." In other words, she claims that you will become strong if, and only if, you eat spinach everyday. Surely it does not follow that becoming strong is identical to eating spinach...right? Now I am tempted to consider the question in the context of sets. Suppose you want to prove that two sets S and T are equal. Then it is sufficient to prove that membership in one follows from membership in the other, and vice versa. I.e. x is an element of S x is an element of T. So it appears that the "=" relation follows from " " relation. ...

Is there anything existing within or beyond the human body or mind that can be called I? If so, exactly where is I located?

My understanding is that, to enter the military, men and women must satisfy different basic physical standards. Women need not do as many push-ups, do as many sit-ups, run as fast, etc. The goal, I imagine, of these separate standards is to allow women -- who tend to be physically weaker -- to enter the military by expending the same effort (if not producing the same results) as men. My question, then, regards the man who is unable to pass the "man test" but can pass the "woman test." He is as physically capable as many of the women being admitted and, yet, simply by virtue of his gender, he is denied admission. Isn't this overtly sexist? Moreover, if the military thinks that there is some baseline minimum physical capability that every person ought to possess -- i.e., the capability for which they hold female applicants responsible -- then shouldn't anyone with that capability be allowed in? Surely, if the situation were reversed -- if women had to pass some artificially inflated test that attempted to ...

Hi, I'm engaged in a debate with a mate of mine over John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. I believe that the room doesn't understand Chinese because it lacks reasoning and the ability to weigh up all possible options and recognize the most appropriate answer. All the answers are already there and the answer given is not selected by the room itself but by the person and is dependent solely on whatever it is that they say. His response to this (having weighed up all the possible options and recognized the most appropriate answer) was that we simply have different worldviews... that I'm an absolutist and he's an empiricist. What exactly does he mean by this? What are your individual views on the subject? Many thanks and great site. Keep up the good work =)

Have there been any systematic attempts to determine what the most difficult language(s) to learn as a second-language may be? Is the difficulty of second-language acquisition necessarily tied to the second-language's similarity to one's first language, or otherwise dependent on some inherent or acquired capacity of one's brain to learn a given second-language? Or are there some languages which are more difficult to learn as a second-language across the board, so to speak? If so, what sort of formulae might be used to determine the difficulty of the acquisition of a given second-language?

Dear all, Am I right in thinking that what William Paley's mistake in his design argument, was not to suggest a designer but he was mistaken to 'specify' how design came about, so he came up with the concept of 'special creation' i.e. design coming instantaneously. Therefore that was his pitfall, not that the design argument is wrong, but just that he was stipulating conditions on how God should create. I think it was Bohr who said 'Don't tell God what to do'. I think to further show my point is where some argued that this creation was special because the earth was the center of the universe, and when this was proven wrong, certain religous figures acted violently because this assumption was proven wrong. Am I right in the above? Many thanks :) Kind regards!