Bracketing the various legal issues surrounding restricting certain forms of entertainment and entertainment content to 'children', what are the moral issues? How do we, for example, determine what is 'appropriate' for someone of a certain age to view/hear/experience? What is it about - again for example - swearing that makes it so unattractive and thus renders it undesirable for children's entertainment?

I do not have much experience with philosophy, but am interested in debating. Can you recommend any good and thorough introductory texts to both formal debating and philosophical argumentation? Thank you.

All major religions have miracles in their sacred texts, presumably to prove their divine origins. Don't these alleged miracles cancel each other out, and can this be extrapolated to religions as a whole?

Can someone please explain to me the difference between induction and deduction? I think I get it, but merely reading it in books is not enough!!! Thanks!

What makes a question a "philosophical" question? It's easy enough to understand that scientific questions, for example, don't fit here, but beyond such obvious eliminations I'm at somewhat of a loss to come up with some more rigorous criteria.

What do philosophy and philosophers do nowadays? In the past new ideas affected politics and all that jazz, sort of. But what about today? Maybe it's just obscure and the general public hasn't noticed but what has philosophy accomplished of late? In my eyes, philosophers just keep arguing about old texts and inferred meanings and things humans will always wonder. So where is philosophy going?

It is commonly stated that evidence, reason and logic are inadequate and inappropriate for claims of the existence of a god, transcendent or supernatural beings or phenomena, etc., and that faith alone must be relied upon. Unless I'm missing something then on these grounds, there can be no misguided faith(s), since to distinguish between misguided and valid faith one would have to give a reason why a particular faith is in one category vs. the other, contradicting its own status, correct? My question: is faith ever valid?

Do you think a crime committed against a nun should carry a greater punishment than the same crime committed against a prostitute? Or in other words should their perceived social standing be taken into account when sentencing?

I was born in the early sixties before Roe v. Wade. When my mother got pregnant, my parents were unmarried, but they got married and I was born 8 months later. On the whole, I've had a wonderful life and I'm so grateful that I had a chance to experience it. I can't help thinking that if my mother had had an abortion, she would have done a terrible thing to me. She would have cut my life short--so short, in fact, that I wouldn't have ever had a chance to experience anything at all! If murder is bad because it denies a good life to a person in the future, then isn't abortion even worse?

Is inflicting pain immoral in itself, or only insofar as it accompanies or incurs bodily or psychological harm?