The notion of moral relativism is problematic. Here's a simple version: a moral relativist is someone who believes that what's right and wrong depends on the group/society in which the question arises. On this view, slavery, for example, could be right in one society and wrong in another. The idea is that just as it makes no sense to ask if something is tall absolutely, so it makes no sense to ask if something is right or wrong absolutely. The moral relativist says that the standard is the moral views of the relevant social group. This raises a good many questions. What social facts determine what's right or wrong in a group? Are we confusing " believes to be right/wrong" with " is right/wrong?" It also has problems with the fact that moral critiques often come from within the societies in which the practices in question go on. There are various ways of formulating more sophisticated versions of relativism, and perhaps one of them avoids such difficulties. But your question is whether...

Please don't take this the wrong way. Though I wouldn't use words like "stupid", I'm on your parents' side. A man who would take a 17-year-old whom he has never met and with whom he has no real-life acquaintance on the sort of journey you describe against the wishes of the people who know him well is a man whose judgment I would not trust. And the fact that you don't see the worry gives me reason to think you aren't yet ready to make a decision like this yourself. You write "Clearly, though, young as I am, am ready to embark on a journey that will change my life." I ask: why is this clear? And to whom? Here's where we actually get to a philosophical point: the fact that you feel convinced and that it seems clear to you doesn't provide anyone - you nor anyone else - with a real reason to believe that it's true. There are too many unknowns here for gut instinct to be worth much. Might everything turn out well? It might. Or it might not. Can you become a well-educated person without...

An interesting question. Start with an artificially simple example: a stream system with the branching structure of a simple "Y." If the two upper parts were equally wide/deep, equally far from the intersection point and at more or less opposite angles to the lower stream, it's hard to see why we'd say that one was a mere tributary and the other the main stream. If one of the upper branches started much farther from the intersection, and was much wider/deeper at that intersection we'd likely say that the other branch was the tributary. Other cases might be harder to classify. All this suggests that there's a strong element of convention in the river/tributary distinction. But there's a caution. If we asked a relevant expert — a hydrologist — s/he might have things to say that wouldn't occur to casual observers such as you and I. Whether there's a more interesting distinction that hydrologists make between source and tributary for real-world rivers is something I can't say; my knowledge of hydrology...

The first question is whether there's a fact to be explained. Do "pretty" birds typically have "pretty" songs? And do "ugly" birds typically have "ugly" songs? I'm no expert, but I'm betting not. Peacocks are usually considered attractive; their songs not so much. Swans are (conventionally, at least) beautiful; their honking (at least to my ears) isn't. Many people like the cooing of pigeons. But pigeons aren't usually seen as "pretty." I'm sure a real bird aficianado could multiply examples. Of course, there are also questions about whether "pretty" and "ugly" are objective notions. That's a big question, but you can no doubt see that it's relevant. But leave that aside. If your speculation were correct, it would be an interesting fact. What might explain it is something that it's very hard to say in the abstract. We'd need a lot more detail, but in any case there wouldn't be much reason to expect philosophers to come up with the best answer.

The answer to the question you begin with is easy enough: in general, no. No doubt there are exceptions. Spelling them out in a simple a rule would be difficult, but your case isn't a hard one. Feeding someone's false beliefs, especially for one's own advantage and with no regard for the other person's good is wrong. The reply that you aren't actually supporting her "delusions," as you would call them, but merely not undermining them wouldn't get you off the hook. What you describe is self-serving rather than kind or honest and reducing the question to queries about a duty to undelude ignores that. As with all such posts in this forum, I have no way of knowing if your question is sincere or if the situation you describe is real. But whatever the case may be, the larger point is that concrete moral situations seldom reduce to a single question, especially when they involve our concrete relationships with other people. Thinking in terms of "duties" is less useful than asking about the decent or the...

Let's start with a distinction between your feelings and your actions. I might be flattered that someone is in love with me; the feeling isn't wrong by itself. But if I lead the person on when I don't feel the same way about them, that's another matter. So the question is: are you taking advantage of him? There are a couple of obvious things to ask. If the tables were turned, how would you feel about what was going on? And as things actually stand, how do you think he'd react if he found out how you really feel? That second question is the really important one. If you suspect he'd be unhappy that you're accepting his gifts and attentions even though you don't love him and love someone else, then it's pretty obvious: you're using him as a means to your own ends. That's wrong. Of course there's another possibility: the fact that you enjoy not just his gifts but also his attention and care could mean that there's a difference between the way you say you feel about him (even to yourself)...

Love is not confined to opposite sex attraction, and in spite of what some people will tell you, there is nothing wrong with that. The reasons people give for saying that it is wrong just don't hold water. We could go over some of those reasons, but there's so little to them that it's not really a productive exercise. Some people are especially bothered by religious objections, but it's worth noticing that more and more religious bodies are changing. Just days ago, for example, the Episcopal Church voted to institute ceremonies blessing life-long same-sex commitments. For many of us, what's really convincing is what we see. I have far too many friends and loved ones in healthy, sustaining same-sex relationships to find anything convincing in the objections you sometimes hear. I don't know whether your friend feels the same way. If she does, good for both of you! If not, don't be discouraged. There are others who have the kinds of feelings you have and the days when people feel they need to...

Whether it's possible is an empirical question. I'd guess it's highly unusual, but it might be so sometimes for all that. As for whether it's "logical" to live without negative emotions strikes me as not the best question. What I'd ask is whether it's desirable—whether it's a good thing. I don't quite see why it would be, at least given what we're actually like. Suppose my friend is seriously ill and in pain. Feeling bad about that seems appropriate. If I were unruffled by my friend's pain, he might well wonder how much I really cared about him. Or suppose I neglected to do something I ought to have done, causing considerable inconvenience for someone else. Feeling sorry (not just saying it but feeling it) also seems fitting. We did, indeed, evolve so that emotions, negative ones included, are part of our motivational system. Of course, sometimes our emotions can get in the way of responding well. But sometimes. the lack of emotion can have the same result. That's how things are. Would it be...

The word "metaphysics" wasn't actually used by Aristotle, but was a label applied later to a set of writing that seemed to come "after" rather than "beyond" in some reasonable ordering of topics. What we philosophers call "metaphysics" these days covers a broad swath of territory and includes a variety of questions about the nature of things (What is causation? Is everything physical? Is there such a thing as free will?…) Some of the claims made by New Age thinkers would count as metaphysical by any reasonable accounting (for example: the idea that there is a non-physical "astral plane" or that matter is created by mind.) The belief that certain kinds of stones have healing properties, on the other hand, seems straightforwardly empirical and testable; not metaphysical in any obvious sense. The main complaint philosophers have with New Age "metaphysical" claims is that they aren't subjected to analysis and critical assessment. They seem mostly based on traditions in need of evaluation or uncritical...

Your question is an interesting one, but on one reading not one a philosopher has any particular claim to being able to answer. Whatever we know about the causes and function of dreams, we presumably know on the basis of empirical investigation—in psychology and/or neuroscience, most likely. That said, there are a few comments that don't seem out of place for a philosopher to make. It does seem possible that we might learn why people have recurring dreams. Careful collection of lots of cases might reveal some patterns, and those patterns might suggest hypotheses that we could actually test. (We might, for example, be able to predict when people are likely to have recurring dreams, or even learn how to induce them.) It's not utterly impossible that they predict the future, but if that calls for the future influencing the present, it flys in the face of a good deal of what we normally take ourselves to know about the world. And as for being a way for the brain to forget, we'd need a much more...