You've raised a good and complicated question. Let's leave the word "created" aside, since if it has its religious meaning, many people won't find it self-evident. I take the claim that "all men are equal" to be a way of saying what philosophers put this way: "All persons are entitled to equal moral consideration." It's not an empirical claim, since we don't get the answers to broad questions of moral principle by adding up the facts, though as we'll note below, empirical facts can be relevant to applying the principle. Notice a few things the principle doesn't say. First, it doesn't say what a person is; that's a hard question that we'll set aside. Second, it doesn't say that only persons are entitled to moral consideration. It might be that some animals are. It might even be - on some views - that parts of inanimate nature are too. Third, and perhaps more relevant to your question, it doesn't say that all persons have the same detailed rights. 10-year-olds don't have the right to...

I fear the answer will disappoint. "Not bad," in the kind of context you describe, means the same as "okay" because we use the words "not bad" in contexts like that to mean "okay." How we came to use those words that way is something that may be lost in unrecorded linguistic history. And how we keep track of contexts and adjust our understanding to them is a very big and very interesting question that people in a variety of fields are working on. If we knew how we can do what we do, we'd be a lot closer to full-blown artificial intelligence than we actually are. But the short answer is that words mean what we use them to mean, and how we use them changes and varies in complicated ways.

I was intrigued that you take human knowledge to be very fragile. The reason you gave was that there's no way for all conclusions to be backed by premises, which I take to be a way of saying that not all of the things we take ourselves to be know can be based on reasoning from other things we take ourselves to know- at least, not if we rule out infinite regresses and circles. But why should that fact of logic (for that's what it seems to be) amount to a reason to think that knowledge is fragile? Most of us - including most philosophers and even most epistemologists - take it for granted that we know a great deal. I know that I just ate lunch; you know that there are people who write answers to questions on askphilosophers.org. More or less all of us know that there are trees and rocks and that 1+1 = 2 and that cheap wine can give you a headache. Some of the things we know call for complicated justifications; others don't call for anything other than what we see when we open our eyes or (as in the...

I'm not sure there's much of a connection. Whether or not some things are true by virtue of meaning along and whether there are incompatible ways things could be strike me as different questions. The thought might be that if there are no analytic truths, there are no necessary truths, no impossibilities, and no meaningful distinctions between supposed possibilities, hence no notion of different possible worlds. But that seems way too quick. For starts, whether there are necessary truths and whether such truths hold by virtue of meaning alone are different questions. I can't talk myself out of thinking that "1 +1 = 2" is a necessary truth, even if I'm a lot less sure that it holds by virtue of meaning alone. I also think that "There are no more than 2 people in this room" (i.e., the one I'm in right now) and "there are at least 7 people in this room" are two different, incompatible possibilities, whether or not the analytic/synthetic distinction is real. But leave all that heady stuff aside. You...

It might be worth starting with a qualifier: for many utilitarians, "pleasure" is too simple a notion to capture what they think we should maximize. "Happiness " might be better, and "well-being" better yet. But set that aside and suppose we can make do with the word "pleasure." On the first question – whether we can feel pleasure as intense as the pain we're capable of – it's hard to say. We're obviously capable of short bursts of intense pleasure, but whether they're as intense as some kinds of pain is hard to judge. More important, perhaps, even if the intensity of our greatest pleasures matches the intensity of our worst pains, pain seems able to go on for a lot longer; if we factor duration into the accounting, the answer seems to be no. But suppose otherwise. Even if we're utilitarians, the goal is to maximize total pleasure; trying to maximize intense pleasure might not be the best way to do that. We might very well get far more bang for our buck by trying to alleviate suffering or...

Just what forgiveness amounts to is an interesting question. As a wise teacher once noted, it's not a matter of simply forgetting; even if I forgive someone, prudence might dictate that I be careful not to let them hurt me again. One way to think of it is that to forgive someone for what they've done is to cancel their moral debt to you, so to speak: not to ask for anything more by way of amends. Sometimes we forgive people because they've made amends or at least expressed real regret. Sometimes we do it even if they haven't come to see the wrong in what they did. Sometimes we do it because it does us no good to keep the debt on the books, and because the letting go liberates us . The difference between this kind of forgiving and simply getting past some hurt may not be easy to see. If I don't dwell on the hurt but still feel contempt for the wrongdoer, that probably doesn't count as forgiveness. But for your situation, the difference may not matter. What I hear you saying is that you want...

You're quite right: ordinary moral intuitions aren't infallible. However, the sort of criticisms you have in mind doesn't really suppose that they are. Start with an extreme case. Suppose someone came up with a moral theory with the consequence that most of our common moral beliefs were wrong. Now ask yourself: what sort of reason could we have to believe this moral theory? The point is that there's no possible way of making sense of this; perhaps there is. But if I'm told that my ordinary moral judgments are massively wrong, there would be a real problem about what sort of reason we could have to accept the very unintuitive theory from which that consequence flowed. Or take a more concrete example. Suppose some moral theory had the consequence that wanton cruelty toward innocent people was a good thing. I don't know about you, but I find it hard to imagine what could possibly make this moral theory more plausible than my ordinary moral belief that wanton cruelty is very wrong indeed. ...

The second question is easiest: there isn't any such branch of philosophy for a very simple reason: philosophy isn't in the business of predicting what will happen. Perhaps some branch of some social science might address such a question, but if so, it would be a very different sort of thing than philosophy. But putting on my philosopher's hat… To say that yesterday's vices become today's virtues calls for a question and a distinction. The distinction is between what people take to be good or bad, virtuous or vicious and what is good or bad, virtuous or vicious. People – some people, at least – once took keeping women from being educated to be a good thing. What we now think is that this rested on all sorts of false beliefs about women's intellects and capabilities, not to mention a good deal even less noble. Those of us who think tolerance for homosexuality is a good thing think that old views to the contrary can't be defended successfully; that they rest on a mixture of prjudice and confusion...

If Bob had said "You should never tell anyone what to do" then there would be logical trouble in the neighborhood. But that doesn't seem to be the best way to understand what he's is saying. More plausibly his point is that John is trying to impose his own tastes, and that (in the normal course of things) he's not entitled to do that. When Bob points this out, it isn't a matter of trying to impose his mere personal preferences on John, and Bob's complaint needn't be the bare fact that John is trying to tell him what to do. It's that John is trying to tell him what to do in a case where he has no business doing so. Bob's obvious reply is something like this: "I'm not saying it would never be okay for you to tell me what to do. I'm saying that this isn't one of those times. And it is okay for me or anyone else to remind you when you're stepping over the line, just as it would be okay for you to remind me if that's what I were doing."

My first thought is that "public property" doesn't mean "property not subject to the rule of law." The National Mall in Washington is "public property" but there are all sorts of thing I'm forbidden by law to do there, whether they harm anyone or not. Public property usually means property that's not privately owned but is under governmental jurisdiction. If we discovered some no-man's land that somehow fell between the cracks of all national boundaries, this wouldn't be public property and might fall outside all legal jurisdiction. (And if ordinary international law would apply, we could fancifully imagine making our way to some otherwise uninhabited planet.) As for the train, it's almost certainly either public property, i.e., falls under some governmental jurisdiction (say, a subway train in New York) or else it's private property, owned by whomever owns the railroad. In the former case, any relevant laws apply; in the latter, the owners get to set the rules, within the bounds of federal...