I am a student working on getting a degree in Philosophy, and my goal is to get my Master's in Philosophy and a PhD as well. There's only one problem I think. I am 40 years old! I have worked at a job I hated for 13 years, and finally decided to persue my dream. My question is, I have I waited to late in life to persue my dream of teaching Philosophy? I love everything I learn and read, and consistantly get A's in all my Philosophy classes, but am I going to be to old to do what I have dreamed of? Thanks for your opinion!

Why are most nations opposed to prison labor? From a justice perspective, it seems that would far better repay the damage caused by whatever crimes they committed than sitting around in a prison all day. From a rehabilitation perspective, it would seem that having prisoners (who are often from poor backgrounds) learn or practice a trade of some kind, or engage in unskilled labor, might help facilitate reintegration after release. Yet I've met lots of people who equate prison labor with slavery.

I'm a rising senior economics major, and I'm trying to make a decision about my career. I want to do as much good as possible, but I'm not sure how to estimate how much good I would produce in different careers. I've researched the evidence-based approaches that some philanthropic foundations use (e.g., the "impact planning" of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), but their formulas, etc. don't seem generalizable to calculating an individual's marginal impact. For example, maybe it makes sense to donate a lot to global health but not pursue a career in it because there are already so many working in development. Right now I'm assuming that anything really important will eventually be achieved, so any contribution I make will consist of just coming up with an idea/implementing a project sooner than it would have otherwise. So how about this formula: (N * T / L) * Q Where N is the number of people in the population I'm targeting, T is how much sooner I come up with an idea/implement (e.g., a year sooner...

Animal welfare regulations require that pain killers be administered to experimental animals subjected to painful experimental procedures even if the animal is subsequently killed. From the point of the animal, is there any utility in this requirement? Assume that there is no utility if the animal is killed immediately after the pain since it will no longer have a memory of the pain when it is dead. Then, it would seem the regulations are misguided (if their intent is only to protect the animal) and it would be ethical to not administer a pain killer. With this assumption, is there some interval in which it would become unethical? If it is concluded that it is impossible to define an interval since for every interval the animal would no longer have a memory of the pain at the end of the interval when it is dead. If this is the case, then would it always be ethically acceptable not to administer pain killers, since all animals will die eventually.

Is it morally wrong to stop being freinds with someone because he/she is a homophobe? I'm gay but have many straight friends. One of them is Muslim, and she maintains that as part of her religious beliefs it is mandatory for her to consider homosexuality a sin, that is punishable by an afterlife in "hell". She also does not oppose persecutions of gays in Islamic countries saying that it is their sovereignty that can not be infringed in the name of Human Rights. (She thinks the Koran is more important than any human rights declaration.) That said, she's been a very kind, helpful and longtime friend, but her attitude towards homosexuality is unacceptable for me. Is it morally tenable for her to be a friend to a gay man, and a homophobe at the same time? Is it immoral/unethical for me to dump her because of her religious beliefs?

Most people, I'd guess, have racial preferences in dating. I don't think that this is morally problematic in itself, since there is surely no obligation to date anyone, or members of any particular group. Still it strikes me that many cases of racial preference in dating are likely rooted in racism. For instance, I have never been attracted to black women; and while I would insist that I have no duty to be anything like an equal opportunity dater, I strongly suspect that my preference in this case is at least partially the result of racial prejudice. (I imagine that I would more often find myself attracted to black women if I had not internalized various stereotypes, racially-based aesthetic norms, etc.) Is this a problem? Does it matter to our evaluation of a particular attitude if, though perhaps innocuous in itself, it has a causal origin in bigotry?

In Kazakhstan three per cent of the population own all the land. Seventy five per cent of the laws in this country concern property Therefore, in Kazakhstan, seventy five per cent of the laws are made for three per cent of the people. Am I right in feeling that this is very unjust country?

A majority of feminists as I understand them argue that the per se enjoyment of the physical body and particularly the female form is a form of "objectification". I completely disagree because in my opinion the female form has aesthetic qualities that are not "object" like at all and are actually quite human and therefor the appreciation of the female form is not objectification. Are there feminists who agree with that stance?

When I see myself through Freudian glasses, my behaviors, fears, and understanding suddenly make sense. I can see how I might have repressed certain feelings which, as an adult, have led me to behave neurotically; and I can see how cultures, in order to deal with social anxieties, create political institutions and cultivate their own forms of art. When I think of the world from a Freudian perspective, everything makes sense. When I read theorists like Adorno and Horkheimer, Freud makes even more sense. But we're told that modern neuroscience has largely done away with Freud's ideas, or at least revised them so drastically that we wouldn't recognize them as belonging to Freud. What do we then do with the body of literature that seemed to clarify so much of our behavior, now that scientists are telling us that it's based on a pseudoscience? In particular, I'm reading Hermann Hesse's novel Demian right now. It mirrors my own experiences of growing up, searching for meaning, and trying to overcome the...

What does it mean to say that it is impossible for there to be such a thing as a neutral, or objective, observer? When a person walks into a white room that it empty except for themselves and a chair, is asked to describe the room and says "It's a white room with a chair in it", it would seem that the situation they are in meets all the usual criteria for objectivity and neutrality. Certainly, it might be debatable whether the chair is a chair or a stool or a bench, and whether the white is really white or has been marred beige-grey by time, but either way, operating with a definition of chair and a definition of white, the conclusion is inevitable. So when philosophers say objective judgements are impossible, where do such banal statements about the physical world fall in?