Procrastination and weakness of the will (as when people continue to smoke and to eat a lot of red meat even while they understand the health risks and want to lead a long healthy life) are obvious problems for the view you are entertaining. Another problem is moral and altruistic conduct. You are kind to a stranger, or generous to a rival, at some cost to yourself -- are you acting in your own (perceived) best interest? Not in any ordinary sense. Agents themselves will often deny that they decided on the basis of what was in their own best interest: "Here I tried to act in his best interest, not my own." Now you can simply always overrule such agents. You might say that an agent's conscious conduct necessarily is conclusive evidence that she must be taking herself to have some interest that she takes this conduct to promote -- perhaps an interest in being regarded (by others or at least by herself) to be kind or generous, or a strong interest in smoking, eating red meat, or procrastinating....

The number of victims is not the only consideration entering into the judgments of whether a genocide is taking place. Other relevant factors are the nature and size of the victim group and the motivations and intentions of the perpetrators. Still, we can hold these other factors fixed and ask your question again, for example: hypothetically lowering the number of people killed, maimed, raped, and otherwise brutalized in the Rwanda genocide, when do we reach the point at which the genocide label would no longer be applicable? Or: at what time, in those horrible months of early 1994, did the daily decision of the world's leading governments not to intervene become a decision to ignore a genocide? You're right that there is some vagueness here. But this does not render the term meaningless. As Wittgenstein writes, there may be some unclarity about where exactly the boundary lies between two countries -- say between China and Russia -- but this does not entail that it's unclear on which side Beijing or...

One distinction at work here is that between (as I would say) duties and obligations. We are subject to certain (general) duties regardless of circumstances, and we acquire (specific) obligations pursuant to such a duty in the presence of certain triggering conditions contained in this duty. To use the example you give: we have a duty to (try hard to) fulfill our promises, and therefore an obligation to (try hard to) abstain from pork if this is what we've promised. Or another example: I have a duty to rescue people from a serious emergency if I can do so safely, and therefore an obligation to save this child in danger of drowning in a shallow pond nearby. Now using this distinction, one may argue with Holloway that there is no duty to abstain from pork, only an obligation on the part of those who have made a promise to do so. But is this the correct reconstruction of what Muslims and Jews believe? If this were the correct reconstruction, then Muslims and Jews would have to believe either ...

I think you are using the verb "help" in two different senses. When you talk about B helping A, you mean something like B intervening in A's situation with the intent of improving it. When you speak of the punishment helping A, you mean the punishment actually improving A's situation. Either sense can apply without the other. It's pretty obvious that there can be a moral duty not to help in the first sense. In many cases, an amateur should not help others in situations she does not understand, for example, when there possibly is a considerable danger of her making matters worse. There can also be duties not to help in the second sense -- for instance in situations where the potential helpee is explicitly asking not to be helped. A frail man is struggling to get up from his wheelchair. You walk over to help; but he says "please don't help me, I want to do this on my own." It seems right that such duties not to help (in both senses) may give way when the interests of third parties are affected...

Sometimes probability is a measure of our ignorance. If you give me a quarter with the instruction to hide it in one of my fisted hands while your eyes are closed (and I do as you say), then you'll not know which hand holds the coin. (I will know, I can feel it.) So you can only assign probabilities because you lack knowledge. In other cases, probability is objective. If current physics is right, then some processes in nature are in principle unpredictable or such that their outcome is uncertain. Yes, this suggests some reference to a knower: it means that it's impossible for there to be someone who can predict or be certain about the outcome. But why should this be problematic? The fact that a black hole emits no light can be expressed by saying that black holes are invisible - and yet the fact is "intrinsic to reality," involves no essential reference to beings with eyes.

I think we have some pretty good discussion of this question already from earlier Questions 729 , 1497 , 1806 , 2111 . It's a fascinating question certain musicians and artists have raised through their work (just as you imagine), and all the more interesting for there being no compelling way of reaching an answer.

Well spotted! Nozick holds that, in order for you to know p, it must be the case that, if p were false, you wouldn't believe p. This condition is not fulfilled when p is "it is not the case that I am a brain in a vat on Alpha Centauri being stimulated to have my present experiences": if p were false (if I were a brain in a vat on Alpha Centuri being stimulated to have my present experiences), then I would nonetheless be believing p. But this condition may well be fulfilled when p is "I am typing." It is fulfilled if, were I not typing, I wouldn't believe that I am. With this move, Nozick takes himself to have shown at least how knowledge is possible: it's possible that I am really typing and that, if I weren't typing, I wouldn't believe that I am. But do I know that I am typing or do I not? Well, according to Nozick, this depends on what I would believe if I weren't typing now. Nozick assumes that there's a definite answer to this question, a fact of the matter. But, even if we grant this,...

Fair enough, you cannot support logic by appeal to logic. But this does not disprove logic. It just shows that one attempt to justify logic is unsuccessful. How then do we justify logic, or the Bible for that matter? You seem to think of justification as starting with nothing -- and then it's indeed hard to see how anything can ever be justified. But in real life, when we justify, or question, something we always take other things for granted: other beliefs, modes of inquiry, methods of reasoning, and so on. Each of them can be questioned too, of course, but we cannot question all of them together at once. Nothing justifies our thinking as a whole, though every part of it can be justified (or disqualified) by its fit (or incoherence) with the rest. If logic (or the Bible) makes sense to you and helps you make sense of the world, then you have a good justification for continuing to rely on it. If you find incoherence in logic, or between logic and something else you have been relying on, then you need...

Wouldn't it be nice if mathematics could be brought down so easily! But, sorry, no cigar this time. It is indeed true that the probability that you are holding the fat or meager envelope is 50/50. Here are the two cases: 1. If you are holding the meager envelope, then switching gets you from x to 2x for a gain of x. 2. If you are holding the fat envelope, then switching gets you from x to 1/2 x for a loss of 1/2 x. But note that the "x" in these two cases does not signify the same amount of money. In Case 1, x is the smaller amount. In Case 2, x is the larger amount. In Case 1, your gain from switching is the smaller amount. In Case 2, your loss from switching is 1/2 the larger amount (equal to the smaller amount). The illusion arises because, at first blush, the situation seems similar to another where someone offers to give you 50/50 odds on either doubling or halving some fixed amount of money you have. There your reasoning goes through and you are well-advised to accept. Your...

Well, if THE objective in life really is to make money without too much effort, then indeed there isn't much use for philosophical inquiries -- there are better ways of earning money than by being a philosopher. But is earning a living in the best way really the (one and only) objective in life? I think most people would say that there are other important objectives as well: love, religion, friendship, music, sports, and so on -- but of course people have different views about what matters and how much. So here philosophy comes in, helping us to think clearly and wisely about what matters in life. Perhaps earning an easy living is really the best way to live. But wouldn't you want to think about this, and the alternatives, a bit before you commit yourself to such a life?