This answer may not be quite what you want to hear, but if someone is convinced "for a fact" that nothing they're learning in high school is relevant to anything that matters, then one of two things is likely: (a) this is a very unusual high school, or (b) the person making the judgment isn't really in a very good position to judge. My guess is that most people on this panel thought at some point in their high school careers that everything they were doing was a waste of time. My guess is that most of them also woudl agree that on reflection, this wasn't really so, even if the benefits weren't immediate or obvious. The agenda proposed here sounds awfully ambitious: become a Buddhist monk and study religion, philosophy and science extensively. I'm hard pressed to think of many people who've managed all that. Perhaps someone like Matthieu Ricard would count, but he had the benefit of a PhD before he became a monk -- something he probably wouldn't have gotten if he hadn't finished high school....

A footnote here. The intent behind the act counts. But fantasizing and planning purely in the brainpan doesn't count as criminal. The closest the law comes is conspiring to commit a crime. Nonetheless, conspiracy calls for more than idle thought or even idle talk of the "Boy, wouldn't it be something to ..." sort. We do give moral credit for overcoming serious temptation. But deliberately indulging in wicked fantasies seems to be another matter. One reason is that we worry that people who do this regulalrly are more likely to succumb to the temptations that they induce in themselves. But another is that we value the character trait of being repulsed by the repulsive.

Any performance of a musical work will always differ in some ways from other performances. And universalist theorists know that. What's required is that the performance nonetheless have the characteristics that the relevant universal call for. (Or have enough of them; we'll set issues about imperfect performances aside.) So suppose the universalist would say something like this: there's something that makes a performance even of a work that allows for accident or improvisation a performance of one work rather than another. Whatever that is tells us which universal the work corresponds to. It may just be that in some cases, the pattern that the work "is" may be more abstract. Whether that's fully adequate is harder to say. But it's the obvious way to deal with the sort of worry that you raise.

There's no obvious inconsistency. The fact that something is morally permissible doesn't mean that there's never any reason to regret having done it. To take a very different sort of example: suppose I'm very busy, and I pass up an opportunity to go on a trip to some intriguing place, deciding instead to stick to my work. I might end up regretting my decision, even though it wasn't wrong of me to decide as I did. I might come to think I missed out on a valuable opportunity and that it would have been worth rearranging my work for the sake of it. Perhaps this doesn't quite get at your worry. Perhaps what you have in mind is someone who thinks that abortion is morally permissible, but who come to have moral regrets about having had one. That sounds more like some sort of inconsistency, but it needn't be. If the thought is "It was morally permissible for me to do this, but it was wrong of me to do it," then perhaps we have an inconsistency. But it's possible to think that something is permissible...

I'm not entirely sure from your way of putting it exactly what's at issue. I think you're asking whether answering a "why" question is always a matter of providing a sufficient condition for whatever we're "why"ing about. If that's it, I'd say no. One reason is that when we ask a "why?" question, we're usually looking for something that gives us some insight, and not all sufficient conditions do that. For example: suppose we consider some isolated physical system that's governed by strict laws. And suppose the state of this system at some moment is S . We might ask "why is the state of the system S ?" Saying "because 10 seconds ago, the state was S' , and the laws of the system guarantee that S' will evolve into S over a 10-second period," then we've provided a sufficient codition, but we haven't given a good answer to the "Why?" question. If we're puzzled about why the state is S right now, we're likely to be just as puzzled by why it was S' 10 seconds ago. So giving a...

There's more than one issue here, I think. It is logically possible -- near as I can tell -- for there to be an infinite regresses of causes. Someone might find it unsatisfying that A is caused by B, which is caused by C, which is caused by D... with no end. BUt there's no contradiction or incoherence here, various proponents of various First Cause arguments notwithstanding. But sometimes what's at issue is justification. If I justify my belief that A by appeal to B, and justify my belief that C, then if B and C are equally as much in need of justification as A, then I've made no progress. And if I can show that something inherent in the style of justification I've adopted is bound to generate this sort of regress of justification, then the approach I've adopted isn't going to work. The problem isn't whether or not there could be an infinite regress. The probem is that the notion of justification doesn't allow for something to be justified by way of an infinite regress, if each step in the regress...

Others on this panel might well have more to say, but briefly, what you point to are correlations between mental states and brain states. How certain sorts of goings-on in the brain give rise to or amount to, for example, the sensation of tasting chocolate or seeing a rainbow is surely a further story. Even someone (like me) who believes that the mind is, roughly, the workings of the brain/body can admit that we're still pretty far from understanding how we get from brain events to full-blown conscious experience. By the way, for a detailed discussion of the so-called "explanatory gap," you might want to get hold of Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness , by AskPhilosophers.org panelist Joseph Levine.

Let me offer what may seem to be an annoying answer. There are two things you might mean. One is what causes people to become cruel? And if that's the question, philosophers have no special basis for answering, since philosophers have no special insight into the causes of human conduct. But there's a related question: what does it mean to be a cruel person? What distinguishes a truly cruel person from someone who may occasionally do cruel things but overall isn't someone we'd count as cruel? Putting the question in more traditional vocabulary, we count cruelty as a vice. But what is this vice? (This isn't just irrelevant to your more likely question, because if what want to know how people become cruel, we need to have an idea of what state of character we have in mind.) Without pretending to offer a full analysis, we can at least say a few things. We generally say that an action is cruel when it's deliberately intended to cause pain, and when the person performing the action takes...

Interestingly, one of the more well-known statements of your premise -- that belief in most cases is a matter of accidents of birth and circumstance -- was offered by a well-known defender of religion, the British philosopher John Hick. But we'll get to that. Most people don't think very hard about their religious beliefs. And when we get to the level of specifics (that Jesus was God incarnate, that the Koran was delivered to Mohammed by an Angel, that the Amida Buddha built the Western Paradise...), it's guaranteed that most people are wrong, because there are no majority beliefs at this level of detail. But what to make of this is harder to say. After all, something like both of these points (beliefs held by custom and habit and no majority view in any case) may be true for political beliefs, and for views on certain controversial ethical matters. It's likely true even for certain sorts of scientific beliefs, and ceretainly for various broad background "philosophical" or "metaphysical"...

Right after the secret handshake... More seriously, there's no single answer, and no clear one in any case. Does someone who has a BA in philosophy count as a philosopher? How about someone who has no formal education in philosophy, but through lots of reading and informal conversation has gotten good at the sorts of things philosophers do? Sufficient conditions are not so hard to come by. Someone who regularly publishes in recongnized philosophy journals would count. So would anyone who regularly teaches bread-and-butter philosophy courses in a university philosophy department. But not all philosophers publish, and not all teach. Necessary conditions aren't hard to come by either. Someone who had poor verbal skills and neither has nor ever had any talent for thinking analytically wouldn't count as a philosopher. But there are many linguistically gifted analytically-skilled thinkers who aren't philosophers. (An excellent lawyer, for example.) There are some useful generalizations, of course...