There are two major views about space, and they give different answers to your question. One view is "substantivalism." On this view, space really is a thing of a certain sort—a substance. Space would exist even if nothing else did. Needless to say, space it not like things as we usually think of them, but it has its own sort of reality. For Newton space was, among other things, a system of absolute positions. Newton believed that there was an absolute distinction between rest and motion, and that called for a corresponding system of positions. However, the points of space were otherwise indistinguishable; one point was intrinsically like any other. In contemporary physics space and time are deeply intertwined, and we talk about space-time. Space time in general relativity is mathematically like a field (think of the electromagnetic field), and unlike Newtonian space, the points of space-time aren't all alike. This goes with the idea that space-time itself is curved. Roughly, the curvature at two...

I'm not entirely sure I follow, but perhaps this will be of some use. Whether two propositions really have four possible combinations of truth values depends on the propositions. Non-philosophical examples make the point easier to follow. Suppose P is "Paula is Canadian" and Q is "Quincy is Australian." In this case, the two propositions are logically independent, and all four combinations P&Q, P&~Q, ~P&Q and ~P&~Q represent genuine possibilities. But not all propositions are independent in this way; it depends on their content. P and Q might be contradictories, that is, one might be the denial of the other. (If P means that Paula is Canadian and Q means that she is not Canadian, then we have this situation.) In that case, the only two possibilities are P&~Q and ~P&Q. Or P and Q might be contraries, meaning that they can't both be true though they could both be false. For example: if P is "Paula is over 6 feet tall" and Q is "Paula is under 5 feet tall," then we only have three...

The big issue behind your question is the relationship between law and morality. That's a very big question, though on at lest one important view of what laws are (legal positivism) the answer to your question is no. On the positivist view, laws are, roughly, what lawmaking entities (legislatures, monarchs...) say they are. Whether a law is is another question, as is the question of whether you should obey some particular law. Whether you think this is right at the end of the day, it fits the common sense thought that there can be bad laws that are still laws. For example: I'd say that at least some aspects of US civil forfeiture laws are actually unjust. They allow the government to seize your property in ways that, these days, many liberals and conservatives agree are unjust. But critics of those laws don't claim that they aren't actually laws; they argue that the laws should be changed. In any case, there are laws that don't raise questions of justice. In the USA, the law says you drive on...

Probably the most well-known secular argument against abortion is by Don Marquis. The paper is called Why Abortion is Immoral (sorry I don't have a link to a non-paywalled version) and the argument goes roughly like this: Start by asking why death is a misfortune. Marquis' answer is that it cuts us off from all of the potential value in our futures. This is why it's worse than being robbed or injured. At least if I'm robbed I still have the hope of a worthwhile future, even if that future has been diminished in some ways. But a fetus is a being like us in this very respect: other things equal, it has a future with a potential for value of the very same kind that makes death a misfortune for beings like you and me. This is true even if we believe that the fetus isn't yet a person. And so ending the fetus's life does it a very great wrong: it robs the fetus of the possibility of a valuable future in just the way that killing your or me does. In short, abortion is wrong for exactly the same reason...

For sure. Every panelist on AskPhilosophers is fabulously wealthy. (I'd offer a more serious answer, but I'm too busy making money.)

Not sure who these people are, but the argument seems odd, and I'm not sure it's phrased to capture what you're really asking. As written, the question, is about whether parents should be able to require their (pregnant) children to have abortions. The supposed reason for saying yes is that for things like ear piercing, the child needs permission. That would be a strange argument. The fact that some things require permission doesn't tell us that other things can be required. If this is really what's at issue, the obvious reply is to offer a related but different argument: parents can require their children to do things they don't want to do. Therefore, parents can require children to have abortions. Now we see a different problem: the fact that parents can require their children to do some things doesn't tell us what the limits are. Take the ear-piercing case. It's one thing to say that a minor child needs permission for an ear-piercing. It would be another to say that a parent should be able to...

Two comments. The first is that if you have a good reason to think something is wrong, the fact that it happened in another country or culture isn't a reason not to say so. I'm happy to put the shoe on the other foot. If there are practices in my country (the US) that someone from elsewhere has reason to think are wrong (and I'm sure there are), I wouldn't think it was arrogant to offer up the criticism. I agree that there are serious questions about the history of Western behavior toward other countries, but we can distinguish the issues at least conceptually. For example: I'm quite willing to say that it's wrong for a country to execute people for being homosexual, whether or not the West has things to answer for in how it has dealt with that country. There may be more or less arrogant ways of making the point, but that doesn't make the criticism illegitimate or inappropriate. The second point is that if it's wrong to execute people for drug trafficking, then the traffickers don't deserve to be...

Thanks for your thanks. I'm not sure whether we really disagree. The point of my post is that we can go different ways here, but there are costs and benefits. To repeat my last paragraph, "There are approaches to logic that find ways around this sort of thing. But the carpet will have to bulge somewhere. Either the rules of inference will be a bit more complicated or we'll have to give up principles that seem appealing or we'll end up with some cases of "correct" inferences that seem peculiar. Different people will see the costs and benefits differently. My own view, which would not win me friends in certain circles, is that there's nothing deeply deep here. But not everyone agrees." Your concern is about what words like "all" really mean in English, and in particular about whether "all the strawberries he has" actually entails that he has at least one strawberry. Perhaps it does, but I'm not sure this is a question that has a uniquely correct answer. One linguistic approach is to distinguish...

An interesting problem. To begin, I'd put the question differently: is there any reason to be polite? Adding "philosophical" in front of "reason" doesn't really help. And of course, there are many reasons to be polite. It helps avoid needlessly hurting people's feelings; it helps keep disagreements from turning into shouting matches; it provides a set of conventions that help keep us from wasting time sorting out how certain sorts of social interactions should operate; it's a way of showing respect for other people; it helps keep other people from concluding that I'm a jerk. And so on. All of these reasons are defeasible, as they say. They aren't ironclad, and there are situations that call for ignoring them. But there are also plenty of situations that don't call for ignoring them. Your worry is about truth. You say "A lot of being polite is just plain lying." Of course, a lot of being polite is not not "just plain lying." It's not polite to smack your lips at table with others....

There are several issues here. Let's see if we can disentangle them a bit. First, "beauty is only skin deep." I take that to be a way of reminding us that physical beauty isn't the only thing we care about in our romantic relationships. And it isn't. If the most beautiful person in the world is also the meanest most miserable person in the world, that makes for poor romantic prospects. It's possible to dislike someone intensely and know that they're beautiful, and that's compatible with physical beauty being objective. It doesn't make any problems for aesthetic judgment. That said, it's possible to think that some things or people really are more beautiful than others without thinking that for any two people or things, either one is more beautiful that the other or else they're equally beautiful. There may be things or people whose beauty can't be fully compared. One result may be that you don't find beautiful some things that I find beautiful, and there's no question of one of us being wrong . ...