Yes, because we are animals and we can do both. But as for non-human animals, the answer depends on whether they're like us in relevant respects. In the case of anticipation, the answer at least seems to be yes. Think of a dog getting visibly excited as you get the can of food from the cupboard, for example. Hope is more complicated because to hope, the animal would have to represent something as possible, want it, and also represent the possibility that it might not be forthcoming. Whether there are non-human animals with that kind of cognitive sophistication is not clear, and it's also not clear for animals without language what sorts of experiments or observations would help us figure it out. However, it's an interesting question, and psychologists are generally much cleverer at designing experiments than philosophers are. So perhaps some day we'll know.

Suppose Simon gets enormous pleasure out of humiliating people. Is it okay for him to humiliaite someone just for the fun of it? To ask whether his pleasure is greater than the distress he causes his victim sounds like a very bad way to begin. The pleasure he takes arguably makes a bad situation morally worse. Would we really want to say that the greater his glee, the weaker the case against his conduct? Since you mentioned deontology, we can make a connection to Kant's view. Simon is someone who treats other people merely as means. That gets lost if we simply tote up the consequences. Consequence do matter, of course; you're quite right about that. The question is whether they're all that matters, and the answer seems plausibly to be no.

How about neither? Let's start with religion, about which only a few words. Some forms of religion are dogmatic and deeply invested in doubtful beliefs, but it's a mistake to think all religion is like that, contrary to the persistent insistence of some apologists for atheism. And "science" writ large hasn't settled whether everything is a product of deterministic forces, let alone about what that would imply if it were true. On the first point: it's open to serious doubt whether quantum processes are deterministic. And it's simply not true that the macro-world would be sealed off from all quantum indeterminism. More important, it's simply not settled that determinism has the dire implications you suppose it has. Most philosophers, I'd guess, accept some version of compatibilism, according to which physical determinism and human freedom can coexist. A bit of searching around this website will find various discussions. Here's one that might be helpful. Of course, it might be that the...

It's a good question, but I think it may rest on a misunderstanding of Buddhism. None of the Buddhist teachers I know think that Buddhism is a path to not feeling pain. If even the most enlightened Buddhist puts her hand on a hot stove, it will hurt. If people we love are hurt, we will feel sad. Beware forms of Buddhism (or any other view of the world) that says otherwise. In the Buddhist tradition, there are stories of the Buddha repeatedly meeting Mara. In some of the stories, he invites Mara to tea. Many teachers would say that the point is to remind us: the Buddha was still a human being. He still could feel anger, pain and the like. The difference, the Buddhist would say, is that the Buddha had learned not to get attached to those things They didn't take him over and control him. Enlightenment and permanent happiness aren't the same thing, on my understanding. The enlightened person is one who's awake - who sees things for what they are. One of the facts about the way things are is that pain...

The key is to be careful about what Kant says. You must never use people merely as means, but must also treat them as an end in themselves. One common example is buying something in a store. I use the clerk as a means to the transaction, but I don't coerce her/him. If I did, that would be a case of using someone merely as a means. Since I take seriously the need for the clerk's (implicit) consent to the arrangement, I am also treating the clerk as an end. Networking is similar. The people in the network all consent. No one is being coerced, and so long as everyone is being truthful and otherwise decent to one another, then there's no violation of the Categorical Imperative.

One sure way to prove invalidity is to describe a possible case where the premises of an argument are true and the conclusion false. To make things a bit more plausible, let's change the example slightly. The following is valid: "q, not-p implies not-q, therefore p" I pick this example because this argument (closely related to modus ponens ) is one that people have a little more trouble seeing, or so my experience teaching logic suggests. So there could be and likely are cases where a person judges that q, and judges that not-p implies not-q, but has trouble with the logical leap and therefore fails to judge that p. That's a counterexample to the argument you're interested in. We have someone who judges the premises of a valid argument to be true but doesn't judge the conclusion to be true. This isn't surprising. To judge something is (putting it a bit crudely) to be in a certain state of mind toward it. Being in the "judges that" state of mind toward the premises of an...

It's a recurring question, and various versions of it make their way into arguments for God's existence. For the moment, I'll just raise one obvious worry (not original to me.) Let's agree that human life is extraordinary. If we assume that this calls for divine explanation, we run the risk of positing a being who is at least as extraordinary as we are, and therefore at least as much in need of explanation. But in that case, we seem either to be set upon an infinite regress or else it isn't clear that we had to take the first step in the first place. This hardly settle the question of whether there's a God (I'm taking that to be what you men by Higher Power.) But it does point out that some arguments for God's existence are too simple and too quick.

It's an interesting question, but I'm going to turn your last sentence into my answer: it becomes violence when whatever we're dealing with is not an inanimate object, but is capable of suffering. Could a robot fit that description? It could if its wiring, programming, detection systems and whatever else needs to be mentioned make it able to suffer; more generally, if the thing is sentient. It's a fair guess that whatever the full story, plush toys won't make the cut. Just what that would take is both controversial and in any case hard to say for sure. But if *we* are capable of suffering because of the way our physical bits fit together, then at least in principle, an artificially made thing could have bits fitting together in the right sort of way. The fact that it would be "programmed" isn't a problem. After all, there's a good deal about the way our brains work that we might as well count as programming by way of our brain's Bauplan and the ways we've bumped up against the world. So...

You're making a perfectly good point: no one can figure out what will make people happy just by sitting in their armchair. But there are a lot of things we might mean by the word "happy" and if we just ask the person on the street if they're happy, we may not know what to make of the answer. There's a recent short essay by Gary Gutting in the New York Times' The Stone series that deals with some of the issues here. and for present purposes I don't have a lot to add. But at the least, we'd want to make a distinction between the passing state of our moods and the condition of our lives overall. Being annoyed of an afternoon doesn't mean that I'm not happy, full stop. And being in a good mood on another afternoon also doesn't mean I'm happy, full stop. To which we can add: part of what Aristotle and other philosophers want to know is what sorts of things make for a life worth living; the word "happiness" is at best a rough translation for "eudaimonia." There's another problem with just asking...

Thanks for a few moments of idle amusement! Perhaps the best response is "Oy!" But to earn the huge salary in Merely Possible Dollars that the site pays me, a bit more is called for. So yes: it's a case of false analogy, and the analogy goes bad in indefinitely many ways. But one of them has at least some intrinsic logical interest. Suppose that as a matter of social policy, we set up a system that left everyone with a paycheck of the same size at the end of every month. What does that amount to? It amounts to saying that each person can acquire the same quantity of goods as each other person. Maybe that would be a bad idea; maybe the result would be that people would get lazy and less wealth would end up getting produced overall. But that's not built into to very logic of the idea. It's an empirical claim, even if a highly plausible one. There's nothing logical incoherent, as it were, about a system intended to produce completely uniform distribution of wealth, whatever the practical...