Is there a difference of aesthetic value between a genuine piece of art and an indistinguishable fake of it? Erez B., Israel

When parents take measures to select for beneficial genetic traits in their children (e.g., by selecting MENSA members as sperm donors), who benefits? I take it that the intuition is that the children benefit. There's something weird about this idea, however. It's not as though we are conferring intelligence or good looks on a child who would otherwise be ordinary; rather, we're trying to ensure that the ordinary child never comes into existence in the first place.

I thought that modern philosophy tended towards the tentative, the open-ended, and the permanent possibility of error, yet some philosophers on this site answer questions, usually on moral issues, with an almost dogmatic certainty worthy of Pope Ratzinger. How come?

If you choose to bring a child into the world, you are necessarily condemning the child to suffer, in at least the following ways, if not more: (1) The child will experience physical pain. (2) No matter how hard you try, you will foist your own failings and fears onto the child, which will directly and indirectly cause the child great suffering and psychic pain. (3) The child will have to go through the difficult and painful process of figuring out how s/he fits (or doesn't) into a society with values that are -- for lack of a better general descriptive term -- pretty warped. (4) The child is likely to have excruciatingly-painful adolescent experiences figuring out the mating system and social cues of humans. If you want evidence for the magnitude of this pain, ask any adult to remember in detail one of these adolescent experiences without cringing. (5) Unless the child believes in God or the equivalent, s/he will live every day of his/her life knowing that any meaning to life is self-generated...

How should we think of abortion in view of common sense beliefs about death? In Question #1596, Professor Gentzler's solution to the problem of death-as-punishment was to suggest that we should see death, not as placing a person in some worse state (since a dead person is in no state at all), but as depriving him of what benefits he might have enjoyed had he lived. Yet by this same brand of reasoning, couldn't we argue that aborted fetuses are harmed in an analogous way? In both cases we have a puzzle about people who in some sense don't exist; the dead person because he is no longer conscious, the fetus because it is not sufficiently developed.

What are some points to keep in mind when writing for a philosophy class? I just finished a course where every thing I wrote seemed to be wrong.

I find it hard to read Derrida. Is one supposed to grapple with every word, in the same way that one would do with maths, or to just surf along the text, going 'I can sort-of-understand' in the same way one would read some poems (I am sure I am offending some poets here, but just want to illustrate my point).

My dog sometimes acts in an aggressive way because he feels he has to protect my family like we're his pack. I find it interesting that although he lives in an environment very different from what would be natural, he still feels the need to do this because of his instinct. He feels that the world is in his control and is oblivious to politics and other issues that affect the whole world. How do we know that we are any different to my dog? We assume that he knows very little about the world, but he probably thinks the same about us and so how can we know that the world isn't actually being run by him? Or if not by him how do we know that everything we think we control and understand isn't actually in the control of ants, or plants, or stars? Millie =]

If Descartes believed that God would not deceive him and God can defy logical impossibilities, then wouldn't it follow that God could be deceiving him nonetheless since God can be both evil and Good? I hope I'm getting Descartes' position right.

I am trying to decide what profession to go into. What I mind is that I should act in a way which is best for reducing the unbearable suffering of some people. I want become a doctor. I would make a good doctor. But then an argument occurs to me: If I don't become a doctor, someone else, probably equally good, will do the job I would have done. Therefore, it doesn't matter what I do. Perhaps I should become a banker, and then I can give more to charity. Is there something wrong with the argument?