I think the best answers to your questions are, in order, we don't know, why not, and we don't know. A bit less tersely: you're asking about the capabilities that computers might one day come to have. In particular, you're asking whether they'll ever be able to pass a philosophy version of the Turing Test (that is: will they ever be able to give response that a philosopher couldn't distinguish from the ones given by flesh-and-blood philosophers.) I'd be very skeptical of any a priori argument meant to show that this is impossible. And I'd keep in mind that it's a mistake to think that the only way this could happen is for the answers to be "programmed into" the computer.

An interesting question. I think the answer is yes: there's a way to offer the sort of criticism you have in mind. It would be to argue that by Catholicism's own lights , the reasons for excluding women from the priesthood aren't satisfactory. Catholicism isn't just a closed system with no canons of evidence and argument. Indeed, Catholicism presents theological arguments for its view that only men can be priests, and those arguments are open to examination and scrutiny. Another way to put it: not all Catholics agree that women should be excluded from the priesthood. They think that the internal arguments for a male-only priesthood are weak. Whether they're right or wrong about this, their view isn't incoherent. Of course, this is just an example of a larger point. It's often possible to criticize a view whose larger presuppositions one rejects by pointing out that the view doesn't do well by its own standards. In the example at hand, there are things one would want to take into account...

If I understand your question correctly, it's whether there really could be more than three dimensions in physical space. The best answer, I should think, is yes. One reason is that there are serious physical theories that assume the existence of more than three spatial dimensions: string theory is the example I have in mind. More generally, though, it's not clear why we should doubt that this is possible. The fact that we can't represent it to ourselves imaginatively doesn't seem like a very good reason. We can't represent curved space-time to ourselves imaginatively, but if general relativity is right, space-time does curve. We have a notoriously hard time representing quantum mechanical objects to ourselves imaginatively, and yet quantum mechanics is the cornerstone of much of our physics. We can even say things about what it would be like to live in a world with more than three spatial dimensions. Consider: think of a plane in 3-space, and imagine a walled square in that plane. An object can...

I'm not convinced that we gain a lot here by talking about obligation; more on that below. However it's true: if you are unhealthy, then this makes at least a marginal difference to other people's health care premiums. That's one reason why it would be a good thing to try to stay healthy, even it we don't want to use the stronger language of obligation. Of course, it's just one among many reasons for trying to stay healthy, and almost certainly not the most important. Indeed, some of the other reasons (being able to care for your children, could be an example) might move us a lot closer to saying that you're obliged to stay as healthy as you can. Why the hesitation about call it an obligation? Though staying healthy is a good thing in general, there are many, many things that are each, considered one by one, possible for us, and that would make others better off if we did them. However, there are so many such things that it's not even remotely possible to do them all. This makes it pretty clear...

Statistics could give evidence that something about one of the casinos makes it more likely that your gambler will win there. Feng shui could be the explanation, though it would be a funny sort of feng shui that only worked for some of the gamblers, and so if it is feng shui, the casino may not be in business long! The more general question is whether there could be serious evidence that the gambler is more likely to win in one casino than the other, and the answer to that is yes. It might be feng shui, but other explanations, weird and mundane, would also be possible. (Maybe he's an unwitting participant in a psychology experiment; and the experimenters load the dice in his favor in one of the casinos.) Careful observation and experiment might even hone in on the explanation, if there really is a stable phenomenon to be explained. As for the pragmatic question, why not? If the evidence suggests that he's more likely to win in one casino than the other, he could go with the evidence without...

The most obvious reason why counterfactual talk is taken seriously by philosophers is that it's virtually impossible to avoid it. We constantly find ourselves asking -- for good reason -- what would happen in certain circumstances, and so understanding more deeply what that sort of talk might amount to seems to be a reasonable project. You offer a dilemma. We consider a counterfactual "If A were the case, then C would be the case." You then give us a choice between determinism and indeterminism. So suppose determinism is true. Then even if 'A' is false as things are, the deterministic story you're imagining can still be applied in a hypothetical case in which A is true. After all, we do that sort of thing all the time when we solve physics problems! If the result of applying the theory is that C also turns out to be true, then it's true as things actually are that if 'A' were true, 'C' would be true as well. Why is that vacuous? It's certainly not trivial; otherwise physics itself would be...

The answers to your questions will depend somewhat on which view of art we pick. What follows is vastly over-simple, but here we go: On one broad class of views, nothing can be a work of art unless it has "aesthetic" properties. One version: it must be able to induce a kind of absorbed contemplation of the object's qualities. Porn, when it's doing its job, produces a rather different effect. (Of course so do a great many things that really count as art. The argument might be that those thing at least allow and reward a more detached contemplation. Your mileage may vary.) Of course a film could be highly erotic -- even pornographic -- and yet have various aesthetic qualities that reward attention. But a dull and workaday piece of porn probably won't, and so isn't likely to count as art on aesthetic views. A different kind of account holds that whether something is art can't be gleaned by considering the object itself. On this sort of view, what makes something art is that artists, galleries,...

It seems to be a special case of a fallacy with many names: 'false dichotomy,' 'false dilemma,' 'black-and-white thinking' and 'either/or fallacy' are among the more common. When someone commits the fallacy of the false dichotomy, they overlook alternatives. Schematically, they assume that either X or Y must be true, and therefore that if X is false, Y must be true. The fallacy is in failing to notice that X and Y aren't the only alternatives. Your example makes the point. You've imagined someone assuming that either I accept a particular Republican policy X or I am a Democrat, when -- as you point out -- there are other possibilities. The situation you describe is a little more specific: the fallacious reasoner is making an inference from what someone is prepared to criticize. As far as I know, there's no special name for this special case, but the mistake is the same: overlooking relevant alternatives.

I have a feeling I'm not getting the intuition behind your question. Offhand, it's hard to see why random killing would be less immoral. In fact, depending on the case it could be more immoral. Suppose A, B, C, D and E are all murderous villains. While that doesn't justify taking the law onto one's own hands, there could at least be something like a moral motive behind the killings in this case. But if the victims were picked at random, killing them cold hardly be a response to any guilt they may bear. As for the difference between how a philosopher of law and an ethicist would respond, I'm afraid I have nothing to add, being neither.

I'm having trouble seeing what evolution has to do with it. Many animals, Singer supposes, feel pain. Pain (roughly; the refinements won't matter here) is intrinsically bad, no matter what sort of creature experiences it. Whether animals (or humans) feel pain because of evolution, because a God made them that way, or because we're all sentient animaldroids, designed by mad scientists from Mars is beside the point. Singer's thought is that pain is bad for us, and animals are no different from us in that respect. He isn't making a point about the phylogenetic tree. Cabbages don't feel pain; cats do. So when we're calculating the balance of pleasure to pain, the cat's pain (or pleasure) should be included in the calculation. But since cabbages aren't sentient (so far as we know), there's nothing about the cabbage to add or subtract.