Many people attack moral relativism on the grounds that accepting moral relativism implies that there is no more reason to ever consider anybody's behavior to be wrong, and that it therefore becomes impossible to punish wrongdoers (because there won't be any). For example, moral relativism would imply that we can't intervene in an abusive household or protect battered women whose religious believes would have them submit to their husbands or male relatives. Why is tolerance and abstention assumed to be a fundamental quality of moral relativism? After all, if moral relativism implies it isn't wrong for my neighbour to beat his wife because he believes God allows it, then moral relativism also implies it isn't wrong for me to call the police on him, or for the police to lock him behind bars, or even for me to go over and protect his wife myself, physically if necessary. So why is moral relativism assumed to go hand-in-hand with being passive and (essentially) impotent? Is there really some link that I...

What is it about some situations that make certain problems ethical or moral in nature, and others not? It can't be merely that different parties are involved in a situation - the decision as to whether to ask a person on a date or not is not an ethical one, but a social/emotional one. Harm doesn't seem to be sufficient either - accepting or refusing an invitation to a date likewise doesn't seem an ethical question, even if the person, if rejected, might enter a deep depression. So what is it that differentiates ethical problems from the rest?

Is it possible to divide something into an infinite amount of parts?

I recently read Louis Menand's article in "The New Yorker" entitled "Head Case." In it, he asks this question: "[W]hat if there were a pill that relieved you of the physical pain of bereavement--sleeplessness, weeping, loss of appetite--without diluting your love for or memory of the dead? Assuming that bereavement 'naturally' remits after six months, would you take a pill today that will allow you to feel the way you will be feeling six months from now anyway?" Is this a philosophical question? If so, how would you respond to it?

One gets the impression that the term "escapism" is used pejoratively to describe literature or other forms of fiction that have no perceived value. Is escapism really something to be looked down upon, however? In the same way that a back massage or a half an hour of meditation might help one unwind and put the stress of a hectic day behind oneself, isn't escapist fiction something valuable and useful to us all, in some form or another? Why is the notion so often pejorative?

In Kant's metaphysics, he claims that the world of human experience (phenomena) is categorically different from things in themselves (noumena). He states that there is no reason to believe that the world as we experience it is the same as things are "in themselves." Doesn't the fact that the way we have experienced the world as human beings has led to evolutionary success reveal that while phenomena may not exactly duplicate noumena; it must certainly resemble it very much? The fact that we successfully manipulate the external world through our knowledge that comes from experience,seems to suggest that they way things are in themselves is very much like we experience them. Even to the extent that phenomena may give us a lot of information about how things are in themselves.

While on holiday in Crete, myself and my friends Michael and Daniel began to admire the sparse mountainous landscape. We all agreed that it was aesthetically pleasing, but we all had different opinions concerning the degree of its aesthetic beauty. Michael suggested that the landscape was inferior to a forested mountain-range covered in thick pine forests. Daniel argued that Michael was incorrect because the Cretan landscape had a sparse beauty which was very appealing. He compared the heavily forested landscape of Michael's comparison to a ring with an enormous gaudy diamond, while the Cretan landscape had the minimalist, simplistic beauty of a ring with a smaller but more precious gem. I argued that Michael was mistaken in making this comparison to begin with. The Cretan landscape should not be compared to a landscape from a more temperate region of the world, because they were fundamentally different types of landscape. It is possible to compare the work of a oil-paints artist with those of another oil...

Is religion merely a primitive form of science?

Any thoughts on being for or against bullfighting?

Why do so many Anglo-American philosophy departments still prefer to teach ideas that depend on symbolic logic? Or in another light, why is so much contemporary philosophy in America still dedicated to analysis and ideals of "clarity" that depend on "higher order" languages?