If somebody behaves unethically, and knows they are doing so, have they made some sort of error of reasoning? Is it coherent to consciously choose to do something one knows is wrong? Or does it merely demonstrate that the person is emotionally indifferent to unethical behavior?

I am a humanities teacher teaching Philosophy around the question of what does it mean to be human? I am hoping to find some age appropriate readings/ videos that discuss the basics of the philosophical movement. Can anyone help me? Thanks

My (now-ex) girlfriend recently took up heroin use, which led to the end of the relationship, mainly because of the deception she practised about it and the emotionally manipulative/aggressive reactions when it turns out she was actually lying, but also because I just don't find it intelligible as a life decision to make and lost all respect for her. However, when she asks a me to justify WHY I think it's dumb, why it bothers me, why it hurts me to see her do this, and why I'm against it, I find it hard to come up with a logical reason. She can just say that 'well, there's nothing else to do, so why shouldn't I, and why should you care?', and all I can come up with 'Look, it's just how I feel, it's what I believe and if it's not obvious to you then I can't explain it.' This feels less than satisfactory. She has said, and there is some evidence for this, that alcohol is worse than heroin. However I think the studies that show this are more related to frequency and wide-spread abuse of alcohol, compared...

Hierarchical compatiblism says that I have free will if I have the will I want to have. The theory claims to show that my desires can be up to me. I understand how the theory improves upon classic compatiblism by showing that the absence of external constraint is not sufficient for freedom. But it is unclear to me how second order desires or volitions are genuinely up to me if they are causally necessitated by the relevant laws of nature and background conditions. Can any form of compatiblism, however sophisticated, survive the scrutiny of hard determinism?

Could you write philosophical books on women? I would like to read what philosophers think about women. It does not matter, it can be a book, extract. What classical philosophers think about women?

This semester I started attending a seminar on (I'm translating from German hear) "The Meaning of Art". The professor began with a long-winded speech about how most people, hearing the title, would no doubt assume the topic is the role of art in our lives. He then went on to say that the question of art's role in society/our lives is incoherent if we don't first develop an understanding of the nature of art itself (particularly to what extent it is communicative), and that we will therefore focus more on the question of the nature of art rather than its role. This seems, to me, to be backwards. Art doesn't exist in presocial a void. How are we supposed to understand the nature of art without looking at the role it plays in society? I would think that especially the question of whether art is communicative can only be answered by looking at whether it is used to communicate, i.e. its role in society. Am I misunderstanding the claim, or is the professors approach genuinely backwards?

This question has been keeping me up for the past few nights, I can't seem to put it to rest. Maybe someone here can help. Do the ends justify the means? The example I've been using is would you rather kill a serial killer directly, or through your inaction let that killer kill twenty other people? My philosophy is that there is no "indirect cause of death", and that if you have the ability to prevent that killer from killing those twenty people, and you do nothing, you're as guilty as the killer himself (just to make this scenario fool-proof, let's say you know he is about to kill those people and the only way to prevent him from doing so is to kill him). Am I wrong? why or why not? Any help anyone can offer in this department is helpful!

I'm currently preparing for my A-level philosophy exam and am stuck on how a logical behaviourist would respond to the problem of qualia? The problem being that the 'what-is-likeness' of experience fails to be accounted for as there is no behaviour which reflects this sensation. So how would the behaviourist respond? or would they even deem qualia as a problem for their thesis? Thanks.

If a person performs good deeds according to a logic that is reprehensible, yet consistently leads to good deeds, is the person doing good, or is the good incidental? For instance, suppose an adult takes care of their elderly parents because they fear the public shame involved in letting their parents languish in a home, despite not actually caring about their parents at all. Is the person still doing the right thing, despite the less than admirable logic they use to get there?

Sorry for the length of this question, but could anyone suggest reading material for me that might help me learn about the type of 'freedom' I'm wondering about in the following example: If a friend asks me to pick any color, I am free to choose whichever color I would like. It seems as free as a choice can possibly be. And yet, the process of choosing the color seems to take place without conscious involvement on my part. Well, I'm clearly involved but the name/image of a color simply emerges into my consciousness. I don't actually choose which color will come to mind, since any deliberation between colors on my part is only possible after the colors have simply popped into my head. So, if orange comes to mind, I might tell my friend "I pick orange". But then I might decide that, since orange is my favorite color, I was probably biased towards picking it, so I decide to choose a different color to express my 'freedom to choose'. But again, whichever color comes to mind as a replacement for orange just...