Something seems wrong about the question. At any rate, it's too general a question for me to venture a non-trivial answer to it. It seems to me like asking "What is it that one does such that, if one does it, one has succeeded?" I don't see how to give a non-trivial, general answer to that question. Succeeded at what? Some actions count as successes and some don't, just as (I would presume) some lives are wasted and some aren't, but I don't know how to give an informative, general explanation of the difference.

I'll chime in just to say that the first question you asked is an empirical question and therefore not the kind of question that philosophers as such are any better-equipped than non-philosophers to answer. I'd be interested in seeing the empirical data myself. I would say, however, that your first question leaves out a possibility that strikes me as more plausible than the two you mention: as they grow and develop, children tend to imitate their parents and other authority figures, including in their attitudes toward religious matters.

Your actuarial analogy seems similar to a point that quantum physicists often make. As I understand it, orthodox quantum physics says that the precise behavior of an individual particle is impossible to predict even in principle. Yet once you get zillions of such particles together, their collective behavior -- the behavior of the entire system -- becomes highly predictable. We can't predict the behavior of a particular atom belonging to the baseball, but we can predict with near-perfect certainty that the whole baseball won't suddenly tunnel through the earth and emerge on the other side. So individual unpredictability is compatible with collective predictability, both in the classical case you described and in the quantum case where the individual unpredictability isn't just a function of our ignorance. The flip side of this idea would be deterministic chaos, where individually predictable parts combine to make an unpredictable system -- unpredictable not because the system isn't still deterministic...

One needn't accept Catholicism in order to argue, legitimately, that the reasons given for a specific Catholic practice, such as the male-only priesthood, aren't persuasive even granting the rest of Catholic theology. For example, if Catholic theology gives a biblical justification for the male-only priesthood, it's open to Catholics and non-Catholics alike to examine the justification to see how cogent it really is: even granting the truth of the Bible passages being used to justify the exclusion of women priests, do those passages really justify the exclusion, or have they been interpreted in a tortured or tendentious way? Is there another interpretation of the passages, an interpretation just as good as the traditional one, that doesn't justify the exclusion? I think anyone, Catholic or not, can legitimately ask those questions.

You've asked three different questions about three apparently different kinds of items: emotions, concepts, and physical things. So there may be as many as nine different answers, depending on which question is being asked about which kind of item (and some of those nine answers may be of the form "It depends"). I'll choose just one of those kinds -- concepts -- and try to answer your three questions about it. 1. It's controversial just how concepts themselves exist , but it's clear that a concept can be instantiated -- there can be instances of the concept -- even if the opposite concept isn't instantiated. Take the concept self-identical . Everything instantiates that concept, because necessarily everything is identical to itself. But nothing instantiates the opposite concept, self-distinct , because nothing could be distinct from itself. Or consider two more controversial examples, the concepts physical and nonphysical . Some philosophers say that everything is physical, so...

Philosophers have given various answers to questions like yours. See, for example, this SEP entry . Here's one approach: "The current king of France is bald" is false because it implies the existence of a current king of France when in fact there isn't one. "The current king of France is not bald" is likewise false if it's construed as implying the existence of a current king of France (and asserting of him that he's not bald). On a possible but perhaps less likely interpretation, the second quoted sentence is simply the wide-scope negation of the first quoted sentence: i.e., "It's false that the current king of France is bald." On that interpretation, the second quoted sentence comes out true since it simply asserts that the first quoted sentence is false. On neither interpretation is anyone neither bald nor not bald, so that particular claim of classical logic -- everything is either bald or not bald -- is preserved.

I presume you're asking a philosophical question about the rational justification of our actions rather than simply a psychological question about our actual motivations for doing them. The first thing to emphasize is that your question isn't rhetorical (and I'm not saying that you meant it to be). In other words, the burden of proof rests with anyone who says "You're right: there really isn't a good reason to do anything if nothing lasts forever, if our every action is but a blip in the overall history of the universe." Whoever asserts the claim I just quoted owes us an argument for it, because it's very far from obviously true. I've seen arguments -- or at least what loosely resemble arguments -- for the quoted claim, but I've never found them persuasive, as I explain in this short magazine piece . A classic discussion of this issue appears in Thomas Nagel's 1971 article "The Absurd," available here . So the reasons we typically give for our actions can't be dismissed in advance...

Speaking for myself as an analytic philosopher, I'm bothered more by (a) the fact that "most people consider analytic philosophy to have zero relevance in their lives" than by (b) the fact that many people "regard many continental philosophers as public intellectuals." I think (a) stems from most people's ignorance about what analytic philosophy is and about what training in analytic philosophy can enable them to do. Among other things, training in analytic philosophy can help them see that some of today's public intellectuals (including, yes, some philosophers in the continental tradition but also some physicists and biologists) don't deserve the publicity they've received. Unfortunately, given the way North American schoolteachers are currently chosen and trained, I'm not sure how much philosophy can be properly taught to secondary school students. Given entrenched current realities, a student's education in philosophy may need to wait until college/university. In that case, of course, only...

You've asked two independent questions: (1) Are sex-selective abortions immoral ? (2) Does it make sense to try preventing sex-selective abortions where abortion is generally legal? Now, 'make sense' in (2) can be construed at least two ways: (2a) Is it a practical policy to try preventing sex-selective abortions where abortion is generally legal? (2b) Is it morally consistent to try preventing sex-selective abortions where abortion is generally legal? Question (2a) is a largely empirical question having to do with how effective such a policy would be versus the practical costs of enforcing it. Question (2b) is a philosophical question. One could consistently give different answers to (2a) and (2b). As for (2b), I think that any legal system that regards abortion as lawful is committed to regarding abortion as not seriously immoral , because I take it to be one of the law's essential functions to outlaw seriously immoral things if there are any. But I also think that if ...

A very sophisticated question! In short, philosophers take counterfactual conditionals seriously at least partly because everyday language and thought take them so seriously. Entire legal regimes, such as the negligence regime in tort law, use confident judgments about counterfactuals -- "Had you not acted negligently, the plaintiff wouldn't have been injured (then and there)" -- in ways that matter hugely to people's lives. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a way of living that doesn't sooner or later involve counterfactual reasoning. The reliance on counterfactuals probably extends to all of natural science too, because explaining how or why a phenomenon occurred commits one to counterfactuals about how things would have gone had the "explanans" for the phenomenon not occurred. Your points about determinism and indeterminism are good ones. Theories of counterfactuals are supposed to work regardless of whether determinism is true. If determinism is true, then a counterfactual of this form must...