We could dream up some strange scenario in which I want to be loved by someone - Robin, say - but only because if Robin loves me, this will (somehow!) produce some good result that doesn't benefit me personally. I leave it as an imaginative exercise to construct such a story. But that's presumably not what you have in mind. So let's think about more ordinary cases. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I read the tone of your question as dismissive - as suggesting there's something neurotic or self-absorbed about wanting to be loved. And no doubt there's a real worry here. Being obsessed with what other people think of us isn't healthy and worrying about whether we're loved can be not just neurotic but also a way of making it less likely that we will be. But wanting to be liked or loved can also be an inevitable part of something that it's not at all neurotic. Friendship, most of us find, is a real human good. So is a healthy romantic relationship. So is a warm bond between parent and child. If I like you and...

First, just a terminological point. The phrase "naturalistic fallacy" is usually used to mean the supposed fallacy of defining a moral term such as "good" in terms of non-moral properties. For example, if someone said that "good" means "produces happiness," they would be accused of committing the naturalistic fallacy. (Note, by that way, that even if "good" doesn't mean "produces happiness," it could still turn out that producing happiness is a genuine good.) The worry you have is of a different sort: deciding whether something is right or wrong by deciding whether it's "natural." The most familiar case is probably homosexuality, which is sometimes said to be wrong because homosexuality isn't "natural." You're right to be suspicious of that sort of reasoning. One problem is that what we see as "natural" is often not a matter of how things are in "nature" but of what we're used to. People have claimed that it's "unnatural" for women to perform certain jobs or for people of different...

Not wrong at all, I'd say. The only reason I can think of for thinking otherwise is that it would amount to not being loyal to one's country. We can agree that there are at least some kinds of loyalty we can normally expect from a good citizen. (Not committing treason is the most obvious example.) That said, it would be very bad if the demands of loyalty went all the way to which side you root for in a sporting match. That would be well down the road to mindless jingoism. In one way it's a small point, but it has some real-life relevance. Noisy, thoughtless accusations of being "unpatriotic" are a far-too-familiar part of political discourse. If we worry that rooting for another country in a soccer match crosses the line, then the worry that we shouldn't disagree with any of our country's policies will seem all too real. That, however, is a disaster for thoughtful citizenship. So root for the team of your choice. Root for them because they're the underdog, or because you like the way they...

The way you begin your question hints at a problem we'll get to below, but before that, let me suggest a distinction. It's one thing to presuppose or assume something; it's another thing for it to be a matter of convention. There's a lot to be said on the matter of convention; there's not just one idea under that umbrella. But let's take an example from philosophy of space and time. Adolph Grünbaum argued many years ago that given our usual view of space and time, lengths are a matter of convention. The gist of the idea was this: if space and time are continuous, then any two lines contain the same number of points. In Grünbaum's view, that meant there is nothing in space and time themselves to ground the difference between different possible standards for assigning lengths. We have to pick one (think of it as deciding what counts as a ruler) and only after we've done that do questions about lengths have answers. If Grünbaum were right (I'm not convinced, but that's not our issue), then there would...

The answer is that it isn't. Here are links to recent tables of contents from two major aesthetics journals: http://bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org/content/51/2.toc http://www.temple.edu/jaac/archive/69.2.htm As you'll see, beauty doesn't make much of a splash here; only one essay on the topic. If you do some archival digging, you'll see that this is pretty typical and has been for a long time. Aestheticians would agree with you: beauty is only one bit of our experience of art, and often not the most important bit.

Usually, when philosophers write, they try to persuade. They do it in various ways, some of which fit patterns that we've given names to. But for the most part, philosophers don't ask themselves questions about which form of argument they should use, and they don't worry much about how to classify the kinds of persuasion they engage in. There are certain things we can expect of sensible persuasion, of course. For example, if I want to persuade you of a generalization, I'd better give you reason to believe that the generalization really does cover the range of relevant cases. If I want smart people who aren't already persuaded to take my views seriously, I'd better try to anticipate their objections. If my claim depends partly on empirical facts, I'd better give the reader reason to believe them. Deductive argument, however, isn't quite as special as it seems. The fact that an argument is deductively valid doesn't tell us anything about the plausibility of its premises. And sometimes trying to...

Let's have a look 1) Either you do what you want or you don't. No argument there. It's a tautology. 2) If you do what you want, you feel good. If you don't do what you want, you feel bad.Putting these together, we get that you feel good if and only if you do what you want. Is that true? I'd have thought not. Most of us have sometimes done things we wanted to do and been unhappy with what happened. Maybe you wanted that extra beer. And maybe you weren't so happy about the massive headache it left you with. Of course someone might say that we only really wanted to do what we did if doing it made us feel good. That's not very plausible, but it also may not matter. Suppose that one way or another, it's really true that we feel good exactly when we do what we want. That brings us to the crucial bit: 3) You should feel good.Really? No matter what the larger result? And in what sense of "should"? Suppose I'm the sort of person who feels good when I kick small children. How does the fact that...

I'm not quite ready to go along with my colleague's answer, but my answer isn't any more hopeful. If time has the structure of the real line (as we usually think) then even if it's infinite, every moment is only a finite time away from now. (Compare: every real number is only a finite distance from 0.) But even if time is infinite in the way the real number line is, it doesn't follow that there will be a duplicate of you somewhere off in the future. To get that conclusion woud take a lot of extra and optional premises. More important, even if there will be a duplicate of you someday, there's no good reason to think it would be you , nor is there any good reason to think that you could look forward to its experiences. (These two aren't quite the same issue, as it turns out.) Clearly there's a lot in the background here. If you're interested in more reading on the core problem, i.e., the problem personal identity, you might have a look at Martin and Barresi's anthology, called Personal...

A good point. Usually it's not okay to be rude. It's typically a minor moral offense, but rudeness is generally wrong because it hurts or offends people gratuitously. That said, we can dig a bit deeper. What's rude and what isn't depends heavily on conventions that vary a fair bit. In some settings and circles, it's rude to call people one doesn't know well by their first names. In other settings and circles, it would be rude not to. In this country (the USA), it's rude to slurp your soup. In some cultures, it's the norm and doesn't offend anyone. But there's nothing inherently good or bad about calling people by their first names, and nothing inherently good or bad about slurping one's soup. Not so for killing people. That's prima facie wrong (or, if you prefer, pro tanto ) wrong and it takes special circumstances to make it permissible. The same for stealing. And perhaps deliberate cruelty is just wrong, period. Indeed, if one adopts rudeness as a means to deliberate cruelty,...

I'd also add this to my co-panelist's good advice. But don't tell anyone I said so. (Sh!) A lot of what we philosophers spend our time thinking about isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things. And... (Sh!) Being a wise person and being a good philosopher aren't the same thing. If somehow I were forced to choose between being a good philosopher and being a wise person, I'd pick wisdom. (May well be that in this universe I don't quite manage to be either, but we're talking "in principle" here.) Whether you've got the temperament to be a Hume- or Kant-like social butterfly is partly a matter of constitutional luck. But there's a lot to be said for finding ways to get out of your own head. Go to an art museum. Listen to some music (make sure you put some good rock and roll on the playlist.) Walk in the woods. Treat yourself to a meal with a friend or two at an interesting restaurant. Take up a hobby that makes you work on some sort of physical skill. (Could be a sport, but could be...