My landlord has a terrible fear of rats. Over the summer, a young stray cat started hanging around the brownstone meowing for affection and food. My landlord started feeding the cat, and even put a box for it to stay in, because he is convinced that having the cat living in front of our building will scare away rats. But now it's late fall and getting colder; the cat is looking more and more desperate and sad. I'm afraid it won't last much longer out there. So here's the question: having benefited from the cat's predicament, is my landlord now morally responsible in any way for the cat's eventual fate? Is he under a moral obligation to take the cat inside, or to a shelter, etc? Similarly, am I, having indirectly benefited, under any moral obligation to the cat?

If we take an action as something I voluntarily do, does it ever make sense to say that reason causes me to act? Reason can tell me that smoking is bad for my health, so if I quit was reason the cause of my quitting? Without a desire to quit it seems that all the reasons in the world won't cause me to do anything. So, it really is that simple? Reasons are never causes?

Is it possible for animals to commit moral wrongs? For instance, bottlenose dolphins are supposedly known to torment and even rape other dolphins. Many of the capacities once thought unique to humans (language, tool-use etc.) are now commonly ascribed to certain animals; but I've yet to see anyone claim that animals are capable of immorality.

Regarding the availability of options... I have not been able to take any formal philosophy classes so far, but I am lucky to have friends with whom I can debate at lunch. One abstract question that I thought was interesting, and I do wonder if it is a common one in philosophy, is whether or not it is necessarily better or necessarily worse to have multiple options as opposed to one option. One can easily see that a student early in life may prefer to be able to study anything that he chooses instead of being forced into one option of subject to study. At the same time, there are instances in which the ethical pressure brought upon by the availability of options may force a person into an unpleasant internal conflict that, had the other options not been available, would otherwise have been avoided. For example, a nation that changes its military policy to one allowing women into the military, during the times of a demanding war, may distress some women who had not previously felt the obligation (for the...

Theists often claim that the "fine-tuning" of the universe indicates that it was created especially for man by a divine benevolence. Doesn't the fact that the earth will eventually be incapable of supporting any life (when the sun eventually runs out of energy) disprove this hypothesis? And what of the fact that the entire universe it seems will one day be incapable of supporting intelligent life (the big-freeze)?

I've read various explanations of what philosophy is, but what is "A philosophy"? When a philosopher sits down to write "a philosophy of . . . .," what is s/he trying to do? Thank you!!!

People are often amazed that we exist. For example, I have heard on numerous occasions people say something like: "How crazy is it that atoms have aligned in a particular way to produce you and I, in the circumstances that we're currently in, as seemingly conscious beings?" Is the answer to that: "It's not crazy, it was bound to happen at some point!" ? Isn't time so long that every possibility of life, every permutation or combination of every event is bound to occur? For example, sometime eons in the future or the past, another me could be sitting here writing this exact question, only to make a miniscule typo, and that be one of the only differences between then and now? Is the fact that I am alive and conscious as I am right now a certainty given how long time is?

Asking this as a self-described masochist: Is pain purely physical, or is there a psychological component, too. And is it inherent in pain that it is avoided/disliked? Is it possible for a person to truly enjoy pain, or is a masochist's experience with pain transformed by the fact that they enjoy it that the experience can't really be called "pain" at all?

Scientific skepticism seems to be on the rise in the past few decades (postmodernism, the climate change debate, controversy surrounding genetics & cognitive sciences, creationism, alternative medicine, etc). Some say scientific discoveries are relative; others say they are false; others say they are a conspiracy by special interest groups to sway public opinion, or keep people in the dark. This has raised a question I think we need to answer, as a society, if we are to draw the line between science, pseudoscience and charlatanism, and to move forwards into the future: what good reasons are there for trusting in scientists and their theories? What makes trusting what a scientist says about his or her specialty, or trusting a scientific journal or article or experiment on some specific theme, when we know little about it from experience, any different from trusting a member of the clergy or a holy text? All this, of course, from the point of view of a person who is neither a scientist nor knows...

In my mind, discrimination has always been about denying people rights or opportunities based on some irrelevant aspect of themselves (irrelevant to whatever is being denied, that is). However, we also use the word "discrimination" to describe such terms as "nigger" or "retard". These terms are obviously pejorative, and shouldn't be used by anyone hoping to appear kind or civilized, but they aren't, in and of themselves, denying anyone's rights or opportunities. So this is a different kind of discrimination, then. Why is this discriminating? What kind of discrimination is this? Is it related to the presumed stereotypes we assume people have in mind when using these terms pejoratively?