It's hard to see why it would be morally wrong. No doubt it would upset a few people for a while, but it's not clear that they'd be entitled to be upset. Beyond that. it's not clear what else might make it wrong. If both families are mortally opposed, then I suppose someone might say that one's obligation to one's family demands that you stay "just friends." But it's not obvious that we owe that sort of deference to our families' wishes, and it's certainly not obvious that our family members are entitled to make such demands on us. Of course, I don't know the details of the story. Perhaps if I did, things would look different. But this brings me to what is the actual philosophical issue here. You say that you want the matter settled by reference to some "objective moral standard." But this makes me wonder: are you looking for some sort of derivation of the right answer from a maxim or two? There's not much reason to believe that moral wisdom works that way. The right thing to do is usually a matter of...

There is a point in trying to make society better: if you succeed, society will be better. Is it better to live purely self-interestedly? It might be better for you . But that doesn't mean it would be better. However, I assume that the point behind your question is why anyone should ever bother doing things that aren't just for their own benefit. If you're looking for an answer that appeals only to your self-interest, then the books are pretty well cooked. It could be that if we all do things for other people, we'll be better off ourselves, and sometimes it actually is true. But it's not guaranteed. Ayn Rand argued (I've forgotten where exactly) that if we act altruistically by "sacrificing" our own interest for the interests of others, we've acted against what should be our own highest value. But either this is just a tautology (if I'm doing things that aren't for my own benefit, then I'm doing things that aren't for my own benefit) or else it's something there's no good reason to...

Let's ask a simpler question: is it a good thing to help the poor? By and large, the answer seems to be yes. And it seem even more clearly to be yes when you think particular cases. If someone is poor because they're the child of poor parents, or because they're disabled, or elderly, or unemployed in spite of serious efforts to find a job, or employed and hard-working but not making enough money to make ends meet, then the answer seems even more clearly to be yes. Now maybe there are some people who are poor entirely because of their own bad choices and who don't deserve our help. I'd guess that if so, there aren't nearly as many of them as is widely believed. But even if I'm wrong about that, there are many poor people whose poverty isn't their fault. Seems pretty clear that it would be good to help those people. Why? Because being poor is bad for your health. Because being poor can hurt your prospects for a better life. Because if you're poor, people look down on you. Because if you're poor...

Good for you! You've stumbled on a central question in contemporary philosophy, and the thought experiment you offer is very similar to ones proposed by (among others) philosopher Derek Parfit, whose views on this question are much-discussed. The problem is what makes someone the same person over time. Put another way, what makes a person at one time the same person as a person at another time? The standard term for the bundle of questions here is the problem of personal identity . Usually, having the same body/brain is enough; your example points out that this might not be the only thing that matters. In particular, someone might think that continuity of consciousness is what's needed. The 17th-century philosopher John Locke held a view like this. As you'd expect, different philosophers have come to different conclusions. Parfit thinks that identity is shallow and not what we really care about. On Parfit's view, psychological continuity is what matters, and he would say that in the case you've...

"Should" is a bit strong here. Some people have a talent for public speaking; some don't. My unscientific canvassing of my own experience suggests that there's more or less no correlation between how good a philosopher someone is and how good they are at public speaking.

I think the answer is pretty clear and is implicit in things you've said. Yes: something dangerous can be beautiful. Tigers would be a widely-accepted example. "Dangerous Beauty" isn't just the name of a movie that got a 70% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It's an idea that's something of a cultural touchstone. Maybe the perception of ugliness evolved to keep us from danger, or maybe the story is more complicated than that. (I'd strongly suspect the latter.) But however things evolved , the concepts have long since come apart. If someone commented on the beauty of a tiger, and someone else tried to correct her on the grounds that tigers are dangerous, a blank stare would be an appropriate response. We find the appearance of tigers beautiful. They'd look the same way if, somehow, they magically became the protectors of humans. We also find their movements graceful; same comment. The second question you ask is whether non-dangerous animals that we find ugly might actually be beautiful. The...

I think part of the problem is that there isn't just one sense of "proud." Sometimes when we say we're proud of something, we mean that it's an accomplishment that we deserve credit for. One mark of this kind of pride is that it would make sense for someone else to be proud of us on this account. If someone wins a prestigious academic prize, for example, she might be proud of herself, but it would also make sense for her friends and family to be proud of her. On the other hand, if someone says he is (for example) proud to have been born in Cuyahoga County, it makes no sense for someone else to say "Benji, I'm proud of you for having been born in Cuyahoga County." There's not much mystery here, but there are some distinctions. Think about Gay Pride. If someone says "I'm gay and I'm proud," at least part of what they're saying is "I'm gay and I'm not at all ashamed." There's more to it than that. It's also a way of claiming an identity. Interestingly, in that sense there can actually be an...

Let me be the curmudgeon without, I hope, being too curmudgeonly. I'm glad you've found happiness and meaning. And I'm not going to say that your changed state isn't due to God. But it's at least possible that the change is due to belief in God, and not God himself. As a sort of evidence for this, people with differing and mutually incompatible religious beliefs have been known to find happiness and meaning in those beliefs, even though as a matter of logic, some of those beliefs are wrong. (If you believe X and are happy on that account, I believe Y and am happy on that account, and X and Y aren't consistent with one another, at least one of us is wrong about his actual belief.) Indeed: atheists can't prove conclusively that God doesn't exist. But that's perfectly consistent with atheism being all things considered the most plausible view—the one with the best arguments, evidence, etc. That said, I have a lot of sympathy for what you're saying. I don't "get" militant atheists. Overall, I'm...

Here's one kind of answer that a theist might offer. You might think, seeing through a glass darkly as you do, that if you only had the power, you'd wave your wand and cure cancer. In fact, however, the argument would go, doing that would bring a host of consequences that you can't even begin to foresee. And it might be that if you fully understood the consequences (remember: the universe is a really complicated place), you'd see that all things considered, you wouldn't want to do this. That may not seem very plausible to you, and I'm inclined to agree. But the larger point is that according to some theists (Peter van Inwagen, for example), if we think we know what would really be the best way to set up a universe for the benefit of its inhabitants, we're fooling ourselves. To make this a bit more plausible, keep in mind that for these same theists, our life on earth isn't the end; the apparent evils of our fleshly existence are only a part of a much larger story. I think that this is a...

A timely topic, if you'll pardon the pun. It's very much a live issue in contemporary philosophy and as you'd guess, there is more than one camp. Very roughly, we can carve the territory up this way: Presentists say that only the present is real. The future does not exist, and will only come into being after the present has slipped away. One reason why some people defend presentism is that they believe it does more justice to our sense of the passage of time. On this view, things "become." Eternalists think that all events are equally real. There is no special moment that counts as "the present." Rather, for any given moment, there are earlier and later moments. One reason (though not the only one) why some people defend eternalism is that it seems to fit better with the understanding of space and time that we get from the theory of relativity. Think of it this way. Suppose an event happens outside my window as I'm writing this—say, a car backfires. And suppose that on a planet far...