You have such a helpful and accessible website! Thank you and all the contributors for such a great free service to the public! If, G-d forbid, somebody is going to harm himself (e.g. commit suicide), then am I obligated to stop him? What lengths should I go to? For example, what if the only way I can stop him is by harming him in another way (e.g. by breaking his arm)? What if I will harm somebody else? Thanks, keep up the great efforts!

If I am understanding it, some philosophers don't beleive in moral facts because such facts would have to motivate all people who KNOW about them regardless of what those people WANT (or something like that). My question is if it will make a big difference if those philosophers are right, and we give up talking about moral facts, but talk instead about, say, almost-moral facts (with words like "almost-wrong" and "almost-right"), which are almost identical to moral facts except in that they do not motivate people who just know about them? Let me put it another way: some philosophers say that nothing is wrong, because something being wrong would have to be, by itself, a motive for people not to do it, and this is impossible. But can't we just say: ok, nothing is wrong, but some things are almost-wrong, and "almost-wrong" is close to be a synonym of "wrong", except that something being almost-wrong, by itself, doesn't give anybody a motive to avoid it?

I am thirteen years old and I do not understand the world. In terms of world hunger, how can one possibly find happiness in their lives when such tragedies exist? Approximately 24,000 thousand people starved to death today, and three billion people live with under two dollars every day. For one to continue their lives as normal, or even not give any care, would this be the equivalence of starving someone yourself since you have the power to make a difference, yet you are choosing not to? And is the root cause of poverty a lack of equality within the world, or are specific governments not running thing effectively? For people that are not actively practicing compassion, would that make you a horrible person for not wanting to aleviate the extent of pain and suffering that so many have to endure day after day?

Are there any other ways of arguing against the apparent abilities of Mediums other than by pointing towards the alternative naturalistic explanations for their 'results'. I'm getting very tired of having to provide answers to the 'well how else do you explain X?' response (and pointing out that even if I can't explain X, it doesn't make X true by default). Perhaps there's a way of showing how the idea of disembodied souls is flawed in the first place, or debunking a similar aspect of the background theory. I'm getting very concerned that my Mother-in-law's fascination with the Mediums on TV and and in the books she reads may lead to her wasting lots of money she can't really afford.

You are an amazing website! I have told many people about you guys. We greatly appreciate your kind services. I feel smarter and like I have learned something after having visited your site. Here's a hard question. I heard it on a television called the Office. Can you steal food in order to feed your starving family? If so, why? I know, you want your family to survive. But still, stealing is a crime. Would you even *murder* to feed your family? Where do we draw the line? Who determines? The best philosophers? Doesn't G-d decide because he made us and the world? Many Thanks!

It seems plausible that a person might do something they don't want to do, without any external pressure. For example, a person on a diet might cheat and eat a bar of chocolate, even though they don't want to cheat; or a person trying to quit smoking might smoke a cigarette even if they don't want to smoke the cigarette. And yet, these are actions which require conscious activity in order to complete - these aren't accidents, and so it seems fair to say that, on some level, even if the person on a diet doesn't want to eat the chocolate, he or she does, in fact, want to eat the chocolate. This seems absolutely contradictory - yet surely, everybody has, at some point or another in their life, given in to some temptation despite not wanting to, or otherwise done something that they, in strong terms, did not want to do, even though they weren't forced to do so. How, then, are we to make sense of such situations? It seems logically impossible to both want to eat something and to want to refrain from...

There is this idea that languages can be judged and valued - take the very stereotypical image of the proud French person praising their own language's beauty and warmth while explaining that English is an impure, soulless and emotionless tongue with "stolen" vocabulary. Is the idea that languages can be judged and praised/scorned (sort of like works of art) rooted in a theory of linguistic aesthetics? Has such a theory ever been articulated? More to the point, are there any general justifications for such views, or are words really just words?

Is there a difference between liberty and freedom? From listening to people and reading about the issue, it seems that they are used synonymously.

Is there a fundamental link between behavior we view as immoral, and behavior we view as repulsive, disgusting, or otherwise aesthetically unpleasant? It seems the terms of the latter are sometimes used to describe the former.

I'm interested in creativity and gender: specifically why the discussion of women writers seems to get extraordinarily fraught when one throws in the idea of motherhood. I have seen young female writers write long manifestos about why they'll never be mothers because motherhood will interfere with their work; I've seen how mostly women who are granted bona fide "genius" status are childless (Austen, Dickinson, Eliot, Wharton, O'Connor, Welty). It is less severe today, but still exists: our only universally recognized feminine "geniuses" seem to be the non-mothers Zadie Smith, Joyce Carol Oates, and, of the six female Nobel laureates in literature in the past twenty years, only one half--Morrison, Lessing, and Gordimer--had children, which can't be representative of either the population of women in toto, or that of women who are writers. Worse, and this may simply be an assumption on my part, but oftentimes women don't get judged as "important" as their male counterparts until they are beyond the age of...