I feel a very great love for someone, but I'm not sure what kind of love it is, and I'm worried that it might be the wrong kind of love. It has agapic elements in the sense that I want to do good for the person, but it is also rather erotic. Do you have any clear sense of whether there are any necessary and sufficient conditions by means of which I may decide this issue once and for all? Many thanks.

Does the great size of the population give me an out, since my contribution, say one in 150,000,000, is neither here nor there, when it comes to,say, voting, recycling garbage, paying taxes? Of course, if "everybody did it", it would be a problem. But everybody, in fact, isn't doing it, so there is no actual problem. My failure to co-operate has a minimal impact. And, my keeping quiet about my non-co-operation further minimizes the minimal impact.

Is happiness really all that important? A lot of people think so, but that being happy just for happiness' sake is a waste. If there was a "happiness pill" that could make me happy for the rest of my life, I wouldn't take it. Because if I did, I'd get lazy and wouldn't accomplish anything. It seems like the pill would be cheating. But on the other hand, I'm not so sure I'd want to be the most successful person in the world if it meant I could never be happy. So I have to wonder: is it happiness or the things that make us happy that we should value?

What has happened in the last hundred years which convinces us that our 'scientific knowledge' is any more valid than previously?

Do moral philosophers work like this: 1. I have a Wish to see a certain form of society. 2. I must now think of a Reason why everybody should work to create this form of society. 3. Got it! 4. In order to make my Reason compelling, I will now claim that the Reason pre-dates my Wish. 5. My Wish is now the product of the pre-existing Reason. 6. All persons of Reason will share my Wish and work to create the form of society designed by my Wish.

Hi, a friend of mine posited an interesting thought experiment (which may or may not be original) and it goes like this. A man's walking down the road when he gets shot at. The shooter misses but the sound of the shot startles the man so much that he jumps out of the way of an oncoming bus that would have most certainly killed him. The shooter runs away because he's afraid of drawing attention to himself. What is the moral judgement on this shooter who inadvertently saved a life while intending on taking it? What value is attached to morally 'good' actions motivated by 'bad' intentions? If the emphasis is not on an individual's inherent motivations, then I have another question which perhaps requires separate scrutiny to the first one but is related nonetheless: could colonialism ever be regarded as a moral act, given that it created several moral 'goods' (think of the abolition of widow immolation in India known as sati, or several brutal initiation ceremonies in tribal Africa) even though the...

Mother Theresa accepted donations for her work from all sources - regardless of the background of the donors. She said that once the money was in her possession, she would put it to good use - its origin was irrelevant. The same argument has also been put forward by academic institutions who accept large sums of money for capital works from, e.g., donors with a known history of arms dealing. Was Mother Theresa wrong to accept this money? Should universities not accept such donations?

In the divided line and the allegory of the cave, Plato talks about 'images', 'objects' and their relationship. I understood this purely as an allegory to explain how people can reach the the ultimate knowledge of the good, not as an explanation of how people perceive things. Still some dispute on the question if Plato would have thought knowledge about sensible things (a rock, a chair, light, sound etc.) is possible or we can only have opinions about them. But was Plato talking about sensible things, or is it merely an allegory for 'knowledge about the good', or 'the form of the good', as he names it himself, which could be the source of sensible objects, but never an object itself. Can we project his ideas on such things?

Is scientific research a good use of government funding when hospitals, schools and social services are suffering from tight budgets??

I cheated on my girlfriend with another girl for about a year. She doesn't know about it, and is very happy with me. Besides that I am a very good boyfriend, and when we are together we are happy. Now, my close friends have told me that I should tell her what I've done, because it was wrong, and she has the right to know. I agree that it was wrong, and that she indeed has the right to know; however, I also feel that at this point, it is over with. She has never known, and is all the happier. Meanwhile, I am eaten up inside every day with guilt. I knew I shouldn't be doing what I was doing, but I did it anyway; I have no excuse, and what I did was wrong. If I told her what had happened, I would no longer feel guilty, but it would crush her. I would rather live my entire life feeling like the worst person in the world, if maybe she would never have to find out and go through that. I would never do what I did again, because I learned that under no circumstances is it worth it to cheat. Am I right...