I'd suggest that atheists have more or less the same reasons that theists caring about others, treating others well. Of course, there's a possible reply that I'd like to set aside: perhaps some theists are decent to others only because they're afraid God will punish them if they aren't. But I don't think most theists think that way. They think, for example, that cruelty is just wrong. Atheists generally think the same. Now it might seem that the theist has an advantage: the theist, it might seem can say why cruelty is wrong: it's wrong because God disapproves of it or because God commands us not to be cruel. But that by itself isn't very satisfying. Did God just arbitrarily decide that cruelty is wrong? What if he'd decided that it was right? Would that make it right? It's hard to see how. We're now in the territory of the so-called Euthyphro argument (named for a Platonic dialogue in which Socrates makes a similar point.) There's a lot of appeal to the idea that God would forbid...

Thanks for your question You've raised more than one issue, so let's divide up the territory. The more straightforward question has to do with whether animals can be judged morally. But in the background are questions about whether morality is objective in the first place. Start with the simpler matter. For the moment, bracket skeptical doubts about whether there's an objective difference between right and wrong. What makes action what they are is in part the intentions, beliefs, etc. behind them. Two bits of behavior that look the same (say, firing a gun at someone) might be very different actions. Suppose one person is trying to kill someone for the insurance money. That's murder. But suppose the other is defending himself against a homicidal maniac. That's not murder, but self-defense, and the difference is in part a matter of what's going on in the minds of the people firing the guns. There's nothing mysterious here: whether we judge someone to have done something wrong is partly a matter of...

You're right, of course: there's a tangle of problems here about causation, consequence and the like. It seems a little odd to my ears to say that by fathering a child, I am a cause of its eventual death, but that may just be me. Perhaps we can avoid the issue about "cause" by simply noting this: a foreseeable -- and inevitable -- consequence of fathering or conceiving a child is that the child will eventually die. And so we can put the apparent principle another way: I'm morally responsible for the foreseeable, not to mention inevitable consequences of what I do. If this is right, then when my children eventually die, I will be morally responsible for their deaths. But what about that "if?" Let's agree: If I didn't feed my children, or didn't get them needed medical care and they died as a result, I'd be morally responsible for their deaths. I'd also be morally responsible if they died as a result of my negligence -- because, for example, I let them play by the swimming pool at the age...

Your question is an interesting one. It's puzzling at first to imagine experiencing two very different, apparently conflicting momentary feelings at the same time. For example: it's hard to know what we would make of someone who claimed to be experiencing a feeling of great calm and extreme anxiety both at the same time. I say "hard" advisedly, however, rather than "impossible." Feeling-states can be quite complicated, and although we can't experience literally contradictory states at the same time (because contradictions can't be true), it might well take near-paradoxical language to convey what some feeling states are like. In any case, something like this is almost certainly part of the story. We're clearly capable of experiencing complex combinations of feeling tone. For example: you've probably had the experience of really enjoying a conversation while at the same time being aware that you have a mild but unpleasant backache. One might be foreground, so to speak, and the other background. That...

Part of the problem is to decide what counts as "tampering with the natural order." In at least some senses, we "tamper with the natural order" all the time. Modern medicine is a clear example, but you could even make the case that selective breeding of the sort that farmers and gardeners have practiced for centuries is another case. Most of us don't see these as wrong. It may be useful to step back and look at the phrase "playing God." If there is a God, and if that God has designed a providential plan that works to our benefit and if some sort of intervention would amount to thwarting that plan, then that would be a reason for not making the intervention. Those, needless to say, are big "ifs." However, even if we grant them, we're left with the problem of deciding which sorts of interventions would count. God's plan -- even if there is one -- isn't as clear as some would like to claim. But let's leave the theological issue aside. You ask whether tampering with the natural order is...

If I read you correctly, your point is this: if you're prepared to assert P, you should be prepared to assert that you know that P. And the converse is even clearer: if you are willing to assert that you know that P, you're willing to assert that P is true. That's an interesting and important observation, but it doesn't show that the standard analysis of knowledge is circular. Suppose I'm prepared to assert that P. Do I actually know that P? That depends. Even if I'm prepared to make a sincere assertion -- and hence believe that P -- I might not really be justified or P might not actually be true. In either case, the classical analysis says, I don't actually know that P. The analysis of knowledge doesn't make any reference to what people are prepared to assert. On the contrary: it points out how there can be a gap between what we're prepared to assert and what we actually know. We could turn this into a slogan: saying it's so is saying you know, but that doesn't mean you do.

Perhaps we could start with a related question: who owns you? The answer, I'd think, is "No one." You aren't property. You may have obligations and responsibilities to others, but part of the way we think about persons is that they aren't property and shouldn't be treated as such. That suggests that children aren't property either. They have more limited rights and responsibilities than adults do, but they don't belong to anyone in the way that, say, a painting might belong to me. Suppose I own a valuable painting by some important artist -- Cezanne, for the sake of an example. Then though it would be a wasteful and bizarre thing for me to do, I am entitled to do most anything with that Cezanne -- including burning it or using it as a tablecloth. That goes with it's being property. But suppose I have a child. The word "have" here doesn't mean "own." For present purposes, it might best be thought of as meaning "am responsible for," and not just biologically. The child is entitled to be...

The Golden Rule needs to be treated carefully, as you are in effect pointing out. As a formulation of a moral principle it's at best a rule of thumb. One obvious problem is that overly-specific interpretations don't work. An example: suppose John is terrified of public speaking. He would like never to be asked to give a speech. Does that mean that if John accepts the Golden Rule, he should never ask anyone to give a speech? Presumably not. After all, suppose Rachel loves giving speeches, is good at it, and John is part of a group of people who need a speech on a topic Rachel could talk about. It would be very odd to say that fidelity to the Golden Rule would call for John not asking Rachel to give the speech. So the first point is that following the Golden Rule doesn't call for treating one's idiosyncrasies as having some general moral significance. Now let's turn to the self-sufficient person of your example. Is their aversion to taking charity a mere psychological peculiarity? Or is it that...

You're quire right: it's a moral judgment. It's arguable that there's no logical bridge that can take us from non-moral judgments to moral judgments; this is a way of putting the old point that you can't derive an "ought" from an "is." But I'd like to pause a bit on your last question: what morality is this judgment about hurting others based on? And I'd like to suggest that there needn't be any interesting answer to that. Moral judgments come before moral theory, and we don't need a moral theory to be justified in making them. This is a good thing, because moral theory is a contentious area. In spite of this, people who disagree in matters of moral theory might well agree that it's generally wrong to harm others, even if they give different account of what the wrongness consists in. As for where the judgment comes from, there's more than one thing that might mean. It might be a way of asking for a historical story, or a psychological story, or an evolutionary story, or -- quite differently --...

I think you've raised a good question, but I do think the issue is a lot more general than religion. In raising children, we convey a great deal to them about our beliefs and values on many things -- including many controversial things. This includes political values, larger ethical values, what sources of information are to be trusted and a good deal more. It's hard to see how we could avoiding doing that, and hard to see why we would want not to. That said, the word "indoctrination" is perhaps the key here. We can raise our children to be more or less thoughtful, more or less open-minded, more or less willing to reason. If we tend to stress thoughtfulness, inquisitiveness, willingness to consider objections to one's own views, then the word "indoctrination" seems less appropriate. Of course, open-mindedness and cognitive flexibility are values that not everyone shares. But what distinguishes them from indoctrination is precisely that they aren't matters of accepting specific doctrines. We...