It seems to me that if I am morally responsible for X and if I know that X causes Y (with 100% probability) then I'm also responsible (in the same degree) for Y. So, if I know that we all die, and if I accept that I am morally responsible for having created a new human being, does it mean that I have to consider myself responsible for the (future, but certain) death of my child? I know there's a whole nest of problems there with causality, choice, consequentialism, but I think the assumptions can be made very weak and very "reasonable" in order to provide a valid "prima facie" argument. What do you think?

When I multiply 2 by 2, is it by a form of reasoning that I produce the result, or rather mere memorization? Does the same hold for multiplications of larger numbers, or arithmetic operations generally?

Some people say, hopefully with a good dose of irony, that murder is a victimless crime. In a twisted sense, this is almost true; once murder has been committed, the victim no longer exists (not as a person at least, though as a corpse), and as long as the victim still exists, no murder has taken place. So why is it that we find the thought of murder abhorrent? Unlike rape or torture or even theft, in the case of murder, we're not around to suffer the consequences of the murder (assuming the murder wasn't preceded by other crimes), because we're just not around anymore. I think it was Mark Twain who said that, having not existed for millions of years prior to his birth, he surely wouldn't mind not existing after his death. So why is (unprovoked) murder one of the worst crimes there is, in almost all societies? Is it the fear of death? Is it because we don't want to witness others dying?

People say that the more wine you drink, the more you "learn to appreciate" fine wines (we're talking about over the course of a lifetime, of course, not over the course of an evening!). Assuming this is true, is one's taste in wines actually improving over time? Or is it just changing? If the connoisseur likes dry red wine from France, and the "pleb" likes sweet white wine from Romania, what makes the connoisseur's taste superior to or more refined than the pleb's taste? Is it just the institution of wine-loving that contructs one taste as superior to the other, or do the connoisseur's taste buds literally detect marks of quality that the pleb's doesn't?

When reading a text, is it possible to determine the true meaning of the text, or is meaning that which is in some way picked up on by the audience, regardless of what literary critics say? I ask because I've been reading lately about critiques of the portrayal of women in modern popular media. A lot of literary critics seem to think that women portrayed as strong, independant Amazon-like warriors are just playing into objectifying dominatrix fantasies, while a lot of fans of these works (like Xena, for example) think just the opposite - that these portrayals are empowering. So are the literary critics right, because they can presumably take apart the text more intricately and exactly, to find its true meaning? Or are the fans right, because regardless of the structure of the text, they feel empowered by it?

Most foul odors we smell that give us all a shock of disgust seem to come from bacteria (at least before our mastering of chemistry). We can explain this evolutionarily as a means for making us avoid the most salient disease vectors from our humble origins (excreta, spoiled meat, putrid water, etc.). My question is this, did the selection pressures of evolution act to assign the awful olfactory sensations to the particles emitted by dangerous bacteria and their waste, OR did we evolve the response of disgust to those already-assigned sensations? In other words, does my dog experience a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SENSATION when smelling (and rolling in) a dead animal - one that's not so bad, or does he experience the smell like I do he just LIKES IT BETTER than I do? I think this question might be about qualia, and whether there's a two-step process in how we perceive them. Do evolving organisms just shift around the few bad smells there are to the stimuli that best deserve them, or are smell sensations and...

It often happens that authors or speakers criticize an opponent's supposed position, only for that position, upon closer inspection, to turn out to be a straw man, blown out of proportion and robbed of nuance. Generally, we agree that arguing against straw men is not particularly intellectually admirable, at least not if that's all one does. Yet sometimes, in everyday life, you meet people who are, in a sense, walking straw men. They espouse exactly the inaccurate, misrepresented beliefs that pass as straw men in more rigorous circles, yet these beliefs are their own. I can well imagine that, for some people, they have met so many walking straw men that it is these straw men, and not the thinkers behind them, who seem to be the real opponents; yet since their opinions are the theme-park versions of their favored sources (be it Derrida, Marx, Nietzsche or even religious texts like the Bible), criticizing them is considered bad sport in a debate. So where do these people fall in debates? Arguing...

I live with my husband and his mother. My mother in law seems to have issues with me; she picks fights and tries to manipulate my husband into treating me like dirt just the way she does. She is more than just a meddler. She seems to have strange episodes that might qualify as a mental problem such as depression. My husband always takes her side and goes crazy on me saying that his number one responsibility is to his mother. My question is what is the morally acceptable thing here? Does my mother-in law deserve more of my husband's 'respect' than I do? It seems that he thinks I should never say ill about her even when she's clearly in the wrong.

Modern logicians teach us that some of the inferences embodied by the Aristotelian square of opposition (i.e., the A-E-I-O scheme) are not valid. Take the inference from the Universal Affirmative "Every man is mortal" to the Particular Affirmative "Some men are mortal": the logical form of the first proposition is a conditional ("Every x is such that if x is a man, then x is mortal") and we know that a conditional is true whenever its antecedent is false. In other words, the proposition "Every x is such that if x is a man, then x is mortal" is true even if there were no man, so the aforementioned inference is invalid. But if the universal quantifier has not ontological import, why such a logical truth as "Everything is self-idential" implies that there is something self-identical? And, above all, why the classical first order logic needs to posit a non-empty domain?

What do we mean by rationality? Is it just the ability to judge whether the means will achieve the ends? Is it some all-encompassing understanding of existence? Or is it something else?