It's an interesting question. An obvious preliminary: whether or not all beautiful paintings are good, not all good paintings are beautiful. "Beauty" is sometimes quite beside the point in judging that a painting is good. But your question was about the converse implication. Here's one sort of problem case. Suppose I see a painting that strikes me both as beautiful and as a genuinely good painting. I then find out that it's completely and totally unoriginal. It's slavishly derived from another painting. The extreme case might be a forgery, but highly derivative works raise the same sort of problem. The original might be both beautiful and a good painting; the derivative work might be every bit as visually beautiful as the original, and it might have taken enormous skill to create. It might be a good copy ; it might even be a good forgery . Whether we want to say that it's a good painting is not as clear. We might think that to count as a good painting, a work has to have at least some measure...

There's a classic paper by Thomas Nagel that addresses your question. It's called The Absurd . It appeared the Journal of Philosophy , v. 68 no. 20, 1971. A bit of googling just might find you the full text, though of course <*cough*> I could never actually suggest that you look for a copy produced without regard for copyright. Nagel thinks there's no getting around the absurdity of life. In fact he thinks there's no conceivable way that life could not be absurd. I can't say I'm completely convinced, but be that as it may; you might find something useful in this, from the end of Nagel's paper:         If sub species aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that doesn't matter either... Nagel adds that once we see this, we can live our absurd lives with irony rather than heroism or despair. Your mileage may vary. Here's a slightly different take. In my more sanguine moments, I'm inclined to say that it doesn't matter if things don't matter...

Phrases like "child abuse" are most useful if they pack some punch. When we think of child abuse, what comes to mind are such things as deliberate acts of cruelty, gross neglect, causing serious bodily harm, and sexual molestation. All of those are clear cases of child abuse. Whether a child ends up obese, however, is a complicated matter. Two children might eat the same diet, and yet one might end up obese and the other not. Parents may have some control over their children's weight, but the decision that one's child will not become obese might not be easy to act on, and acting on it might have its own unfortunate side effects. This isn't to suggest that childhood obesity is trivial. But obesity is complicated. If it could be easily prevented, and if the way to prevent it was widely understood, then we might say that clear cases of "allowing" one's child to become obese count as a kind of child abuse. As it is, things aren't nearly so straightforward.

I don't think so. Here's why

Suppose that 201 groups of people each set themselves a noble goal. If I were a member of a group that achieved its goal, I might well be proud of my group. If that pride is reasonable (and it might well be) I'd still have the same reason to be proud of my group if other groups—even all of them—achieved their goals too. As for the point of pride, I might indulge in feelings of pride because it makes me feel good, but that probably gets things the wrong way around. Some things just make us feel proud. Pride makes most sense, perhaps, when what we're proud of is something that we deserve some credit for, but we also sometimes feel proud when someone that we're associated with accomplishes something. Suppose my friend works hard on a book and it wins an award. I might very well feel proud of her, and that doesn't have to mean that I'm trying to take some of the credit for what she accomplished. We might ask what the point is in this feeling of pride, but the question seems beside the point. My friend did...

This is a case of dividing questions. Whether our actions are ultimately free or not, we perform actions. I'm performing one right now: I'm responding to your question. You performed an action when you asked your question. There are various issues about just what sorts of things count as actions, how actions are related to intentions, whether a reason for acting also counts as a cause of the action and so on. These questions come up whether or not there's such a thing as free will. Whether I choose my actions in some ultibuck-stopping sense, I do choose them in various proximate senses. Going to the food co-op for lunch is an action; so is going to the sandwich shop instead. I might pick the co-op because I know they're serving vegan tacos today, and I like the way they make those. Most of us make choices like that every day, even if those choices are ultimately determined in a way that means the actions aren't really free. If you'd like to get a better sense of what the philosophical study of...

Not quite correct. Cyclic theories still posit a Big Bang, but they also posit a cycle of expansions and collapses. This is not something I know much about but you can read a bit more here If we suppose that the non-cyclic Big Bang model is correct, then in at least one sense, the universe isn't a case of getting something from nothing: it's not an example of matter appearing uncaused in a universe where there are earlier times with no matter. Of course, that's consistent with there being no explanation of why there's matter/energy at all. That may not quite amount to getting something from nothing, but it's an idea that doesn't sit well with everyone. Some versions of the Cosmological Argument are meant to explain why contingent things (like the physical things we're familiar with) exist. The explanations typically appeal to the existence of a Necessary Being—one who's very nature requires that it exist. If there's no such being, then it might be that there's no explanation for why contingent...

The best word to look up is univocal , which is roughly the opposite of equivocal . It means, more or less, unambiguous, or having one meaning. Without the whole sentence, it's a bit hard to be sure what the author meant, but the idea of complementarity, in part, is that we can't bring pairs of concepts such as position and momentum both to bear in a single experiment; we must choose. In classical physics, we can. There is, as it were, a univocal point of view that we can take on a physical system classically, whereas in applying quantum theory we must choose between incompatible experimental arrangements and "complementary" physical concepts.

Before your relative piped up, you were giving money to the homeless because you thought it was a good thing to do. Now you're worried that your motives aren't so pure. and you've asked whether you should stop giving because expecting a reward is "defeating the purpose of the generosity." I thought the purpose of the generosity was to help the homeless. Furthermore, that purpose will still be served even if your personal motives are now mixed. If there was a good reason to give money to the homeless before, that reason hasn't gone away because of this change in your psychology. We should add that your relative's observation doesn't show much of anything. Most of us get at least some benefits or another pretty routinely. The fact that a benefit of some sort comes along sometime after you do your good deed doesn't give you any reason to think the good luck was a result of your good deed. But even if it was, the fact that you now have a self-interested reason to give money doesn't give you a...

I'm puzzled. Why would doing something more "self-involved" be morally better than keeping a pet? Perhaps by "self-involved," you mean self-improving, but morality doesn't call for spending all our time improving ourselves. And even insofar as it does, caring for a pet might help some people to become more empathetic and responsible. Of course, pets sometimes cause problems. But so do cars, DVD players, the computer you wrote your question on, and—for that matter—friends and family. And in any case, morality doesn't call for avoiding all problems. If anything, it arguably calls for the opposite, since if we spend all our time steering clear of difficulties, we're likely to end up stunted and selfish. Some pets probably don't reciprocate affection; goldfish almost certainly don't, for example. But once again, what of it? Even if a fish-fancier agrees that her fish don't fancy her, how would that make her a worse person? Maybe I'm missing something, but I'd have thought the moral questions...