If there is no god, why do people behave in a moral and ethical manner? One answer might be long-term self-interest: if you never tell a lie, for example, you will develop a favorable reputation among other people which will allow you to participate in all sorts of activities of which you would never be a part otherwise. Another answer might be "big picture" self-interest: people usually achieve more and have higher standards of living when they collaborate compared to when they compete: "competition" only works as a motivator when embedded in a broader collaborative structure first (i.e., if everyone plays by the rules, we aren't deliberately trying to injure a competitor because we don't want them trying to injure us and so we all place voluntary limits on our behaviors to promote a better outcome for all). While these answers are all well and good, there seems to be something missing: to be motivated SOLELY by self-interest, no matter how you dress it up, seems like a somewhat barren life. ...

I'm struggling to reconcile David Hume's critiques of science and religion. On the one hand, he suggests that our application of cause/effect to natural phenomena is problematic since it ammounts to simply equating the present with the past. On the other hand, he warns us against believing in second-hand accounts of miracles since they are interruptions of natural law. Isn't our use of causal reasoning the way we determine the characteristics of natural law? Is this an inconsistency in his argument and, if so, does he address it anywhere?

On April 10, 2014, in response to a question, Stephen Maitzen wrote: "I can't see how there could be any law more fundamental than the law of non-contradiction (LNC)." I thought that there were entire logical systems developed in which the law of non-contradiction was assumed not to be valid, and it also seems like "real life" suggests that the law of non-contradiction does not necessarily apply to physical systems. Perhaps I am not understanding the law correctly? Is it that at most one of these statements is true? Either "P is true" or "P is not true"? or is it that at most one of theses statements is true? Either "P is true" or "~P is true"? In physics, if you take filters that polarize light, and place two at right angles to each other, no light gets through. Yet if you take a third filter at a 45 degree angle to the first two, and insert it between the two existing filters, then some light gets through. Based on this experiment, it seems like the law of non-contradiction cannot be true in...

Is there a clear way to distinguish physical and non physical things? I'm not implying that there are non physical things. I would prefer if you didn't define "physical" as whatever is studied by physicists.

I'm grateful for Allen Stairs' response to question 5821, but he, like Richard Heck and Stephen Maitzen when answering question 5792, ASSUMES that words like "all" have the same meaning in everyday English as they have when used by logicians. That's what seems very strange to me. At least, everyday "all" is ambiguous. Professors Stairs, Heck and Maitzen believe that "all the strawberries he has" always means "all the strawberries he may have", and never "all the strawberries he does have". But look at the latter example ("does have"): you're still using the word "all", but here it is clearly said that he has some strawberries. Why can't that happen (in the right context) with "all the strawberries he has"? By the way, in several Romance languages, there is a difference between (e.g., in Portuguese) "todos os morangos que tem" (indicative) and "todos os morangos que tenha" (subjunctive). Both can be translated as "all the strawberries s/he has", but the first sentence indicates that he (or she) does have...

It seems that in order to claim anything is intrinsically wrong, one must assert that some specific thing, be it happiness, duty, eudaimonia or something else, has intrinsic value. I cannot see, however, what logical process can lead one to this conclusion from a materialist perspective. If all that exists is matter, then what kind of property would 'value' be? If happiness, for example, is simply a mental state, no different from sadness or pain, then how can it have the property of 'value', and what kind of property might this be?

Is time traveling to the past a logical contradiction? I mean because if I were to go into a time machine tomorrow then the "past" I travel to would actually be the future relative to today.

is there any philosophical reason to be polite? A lot of being polite is just plain lying--why must the truth succumb to social conventions?

Is it ideal for a person to be in romantic love with someone that that person doesn't find physically attractive? Beauty in my opinion is both skin deep and skin shallow--if beauty is only skin deep and impossible to ascertain without having a conversation, then that seemingly makes most of aesthetics pointless. Skin deep beauty seems to be a misnomer because it doesn't really refer to beauty at all but one's personality. Romantic love is unlike other forms of love in that there is usually a great deal of choice in selecting a partner not to mention the sexual component, so if given a choice between two people who have very similar amiable personalities, but one is more physically attractive, why would one choose to be with the other one? Men who go into relationships with women with no curves or large noses are just practicing a form of self-deception by denying that beauty has ideals.

Can a word be used incorrectly and still be 'useful'? I've heard that pragmatists define true statements as those that are useful in predicting future empirical outcomes, to quote Wikipedia. However, I have heard of words being used incorrectly that can still be 'useful' despite being incorrect. The words 'subjective' and 'objective' are often used in everyday language to divide and distingiush things that are 'a matter of opinion' from things that are 'a matter of fact', respectively. Although this is an oversimplified and incorrect use of the words, you can't deny that people still find them useful in labelling 'facts', as distinguished from 'opinions'. It seems that just because a term is 'useful', doesn't make its usage correct. What are your thoughts on this? Thanks.