What about other decisions you face? Does it strike you as strange that anyone should ultimately have any reason to act other than in the service of their own personal happiness? If so, you are challenging all moral obligations and would find it just as strange that anyone should be "literally obligated" to refrain from rape and murder. I assume that this is not your view, that you accept some obligations toward others and are willing to take their interests into account, alongside your own, when deciding how to act. But if this is the way you think about your ordinary conduct decisions, then why should the decision about suicide be special? If your mother's feelings are a reason for you to call her on her birthday, then why are they not also a reason for refraining from suicide? The illusion that we have no obligation to consider others' interests when contemplating suicide may arise from two sources. First, many jurisdictions forbid suicide and also assisting those who want to die....

This is an interesting problem, very crisply stated. Variants of it occur in other life contexts as well. Thus truthful reporting of information can be counterproductive, for example, in the work of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International in situations where such information may undermine the reputation of a political party or faction that, all things considered, is better than its rivals. This case is different from yours in that the responsibility for being truthful is primarily to third parties: to those who rely on the NGO to report the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the various governments, parties, or factions and their conduct. In your case, where the responsibility is basically to the patient, the practice you and your colleagues have developed seems entirely right to me. Maybe your slight doubts about this practice can be mitigated by a brief further thought about autonomy. Contrary to what you suggest, I do not think that respecting autonomy requires being entirely candid....

Vaccinations protect the vaccinated person. But they also protect others (who would come into contact with the vaccinated person if she were to be infected) and the population at large (as the disease has less of a chance to spread if there a fewer usable carriers). Given this situation, a classic collective action problem can arise. The cost and risk of getting vaccinated are mine alone, while much of the benefit is dispersed. So it is quite possible that it is better for each not to get vaccinated (regardless of what others do) even while it is also better for all that all get vaccinated than that none do. (In numbers: Suppose the cost and risk of getting vaccinated is 6 and the benefit to oneself is 3 and the benefit of another person getting vaccinated in a 101-person community is 0.05. Then, if all get vaccinated, everyone gains: 3 + 100*0.05 - 6 = +2. But each can reason this way: The first term is +3, the second is whatever it is independently of what I do, and the third term is -6. So I will...

I don't think this responsibility is confined to those who have thought deeply about an issue. If climate change is a menace to the poor today and to future generations, and if we are much involved in fuelling this menace, then we all have a responsibility to act to slow down and stop this phenomenon. If the responsibility were confined to those who have thought deeply about this, the others could easily get off the hook simply by avoiding deep thought. Still, I agree that as one who understands the problem better one has a special role to play, namely the role of alerting others to their responsibilities. This is something philosophers can do and should do much more of: Help citizens think clearly and critically about their responsibilities as citizens of their state and of the world. In most cases, this indirect way of doing something about the problem is likely to be more effective than direct action. And it has the additional advantage of helping one's fellow citizens avoid involvement in grave...

This question is difficult to answer in general terms because a number of quite different considerations bear on it. The six most important, perhaps, are these: 1. the magnitude of the impending harm 2. the number of people who would share responsibility for the harm if it came about and, for each of the others, their degree of responsibility (While the harm in your case 3 may be quite large, responsibility for it is also shared by many, and this can dilute that responsibility to some extent. When our country is waging an unjust war and kills a million people, each of us citizens surely bears some responsibility for this war, but not to the extent that one would if one had killed a million people single-handedly.) 3. the cost your getting involved can be expected to impose upon yourself (You have no duty to get involved in your cases 1 and 2 if getting involved would involve a serious risk of getting attacked and perhaps killed.) 4. the degree of responsibility you would have for the...

The predicate "morally wrong" seems to require a victim: someone who is morally wronged. This could by an animal or members of future generations. But, in your case, there's no one to whom a wrong is being done. The same seems true for any and all feelings we might have: Our feelings do not harm others, hence it cannot be morally wrong to feel this or that. To be sure, it can be wrong in certain circumstances to act on one's feelings, to lie about one's feelings, to conceal or to express one's feelings. But merely having them cannot be morally wrong. Another argument to the same conclusion would appeal to the premise that we do not choose our feelings, that you cannot avoid feeling flattered at the moment you have this feeling. While this may typically be true, it is also true that we do have the capacity to modify over time the way we feel. Someone who feels hostility toward members of a certain race or religion can make an effort to get to know good people from that race or religion and...

Your experience may be more reflective of philosophy in Germany than of philosophy more generally. There are at least three relevant factors. German students specialize early while students in the US, say, take a broad range of courses in diverse fields during their undergraduate studies. In particular, they take broad (often mandatory) Western civilization courses that focus on philosophical materials that (i) integrate well with non-philosophical materials produced at or around the same time and (ii) are attractive and helpful to students through their relevance to present society. This relates to the second point, that universities in the US tend to reward (often quite directly) teachers and departments for attracting students; and it's rather easier to attract undergraduates to feminist themes than to, say, the philosophy of language. All this in turn reinforces the third point that German academic philosophy tends to be a bit narrow and conservative. While feminism certainly has a presence in...

Nearly all the unbearable suffering in this world occurs among the poorer half of humankind which, collectively, accounts for about 2.4 percent of global consumption and 1.1 percent of global wealth. Are doctors lining up to relieve this suffering? Actually, the opposite is the case. Many physicians trained at great expense in poor countries are lured away to rich countries after their training is completed, sometimes by very active recruitment efforts. So, if you became a doctor to relieve this unbearable suffering, you would be one of a tiny number of doctors, each of whom is -- as best as he or she can --replacing hundreds of doctors migrating in the opposite direction. Check out Partners in Health (PIH) for some more information. If you do not become a doctor, the person taking your place in medical school is very likely to choose what indeed is a replacable job: caring for affluent patients in an affluent country. How many GP's in this country don't even open their practice to Medicaid and...

In dilemmas of this kind, always start by thinking about whether they are really inescapable. One escape in this case it to speak with your sister. If she likes New Zealand, she is unlikely to be indifferent to the environmental degradation that is already so much in evidence elsewhere. Plus you can offer to donate the flight cost to a good cause of her choice, in honor of her wedding. In any case, it is much easier for her to understand and accept the decision if she was herself involved in making it or at least in thinking it through. BTW, I checked your numbers because 4 tonnes seemed like a lot. But you are basically right. A Boeing 747-8 takes a bit over 200 tonnes of fuel (over half its take-off weight), roughly 137 gallons of fuel per passenger. Each gallon produces 20 lbs of carbon dioxide. So that's about 1.3 tonnes per person. But then one tank does not get you there, plus you'll have to fly back as well. So 4 tonnes is a very good estimate. Way too much, indeed.

The word "right" is generally used more broadly than this, so that rights may give way when a lot is at stake. Some philosophical literature may suggest otherwise -- people talk of rights as "side constraints" or "trumps" -- but when you look more closely, they too agree that most rights should be understood as giving way at some point (though for Nozick this point comes rather late: when there is the threat of "catastrophic moral horror"). How much needs to be at stake, and for whom, are matters that get built into the content of the right. Thus, in some jurisdictions property rights are quite strong (property can be expropriated only for an overwhelmingly important purpose) whereas in other jurisdictions property rights are much weaker. Even in the latter jurisdictions, the word "right" is not out of place, so long as an expropriation is based on more than just a showing that it would be better on the whole for this property right to be infringed. You do not have a property right in your car if...