How is this supposed to work? Suppose I go to my local grocery store and I get bad service. Would it be okay to slap the cashier? How about breaking his jaw? Or if we stick with stealing, how much? A bag of chips? A wedge of Stilton? (Could easily be $10.) A bag of chanterelle mushrooms? ($40 a pound would be a very good deal.) What's the rule that decides? Who's the authority if there's a question about what the retribution should be? There's a reason why we don't let people do what you suggest. There's a reason why it would be perfectly fine for the store to have you arrested if you tried it. Letting people take the law into their own hands makes for chaos. Letting people do things that are against the law for "offenses" that aren't even illegal would be even worse. You second sentence seems to be meant as an argument for your suggestion. It's true: businesses without customers won't last long. But that means businesses who give bad service are punishing themselves. You also say that if the...

I agree with my co-panelist that it's hard to peg this as abuse. But I'd like to focus on a somewhat different issue: the word "indoctrination" is being used to mean an illegitimate way of inculcating beliefs. That's fine, and isn't my issue. But the notion of "religious indoctrination" is left unexamined. And so I want to know what counts. In particular, suppose someone brings their children up in a religious tradition: introduces them to the texts and doctrines, participates in the rituals, makes clear that s/he is an adherent, and so on. If indoctrination counts as something bad, is this automatically a case of indoctrination? Surely it depends on the details. Suppose that the religious tradition has admirable moral precepts. Suppose it encourages thoughtful reflection. Suppose it doesn't threaten non-adherents with hellfire and brimstone. There really are such traditions; I know many people who belong to them. The tradition may well include metaphysical claims that you think are just wrong. But is...

A good question. Usually we can't just choose what to believe. For example, I can't decide to believe that there's an elephant in the room with me, no matter how hard I try. That's likely because we're wired in a way that won't usually let us override the evidence of our senses. But the words "believe in" are typically applied to things that we can't check on simply by looking around—things like belief in God, or belief in the trustworthiness of a friend. (It's not that the evidence of our senses is simply irrelevant to such things, but it's seldom definitive.) In matters where the senses don't just settle things, it's a genuine question whether we can decide to believe, and my sense is that we often can. A comparison might help. Suppose my friend has been accused of something, and he asks me to speak for him as a character witness. I can certainly decide whether I'm going to do that. The decision might be easy, but the more interesting cases are the ones where it doesn't just seem obvious what to do....

My co-panelist has drawn some genuine distinctions, but I'd expect many people to find his response unconvincing overall. One obvious reason: suppose I have a five-year-old child who poses a very substantial burden to me. Perhaps the child has a physical disability that makes extensive demands on my time and money. Most of us don't think this would provide even the slightest justification for killing the child. And unless I could be very sure that the child would be cared for, it doesn't even provide a justification for abandoning the child. Now the analogy isn't perfect. After all, the rape victim is in no way responsible for the fetus. I may have chosen to become a parent; I may have accepted responsibility for the child. But even if we grant that those a re relevant differences, they don't seem to get us very far. Suppose the child wasn't mine but had been abandoned on my doorstep. It's hardly clear that this would make enough difference to justify killing the child or abandoning it once more. ...

I've been trying to find the argument here. It seems to be "Life can really suck. Therefore you should look out for Number One." Am I missing anything? I think that's called a non sequitur . Now it's true that self-expression and contentment are goods. (Not sure what the word "spiritual" adds here.) But there are lots of goods, many of which aren't self-centered. Or so most of us think, even though we all know that life can really suck. It's also true for some people that helping others doesn't fit with their "internal purpose." (I assume that means something like "their own predilections") But your conclusion only follows if we agree that a person's "internal purpose" is the only one that should get any weight. And since that's exactly what's at issue… (Not to mention that it's not obvious that you yourself would be better off if most of us only gave a damn about ourselves.) But all of this is pretty obvious, which is why I have the feeling that you're pulling our legs. ("well...

It's a good question and I don't think it has an easy answer. On the one hand, if laws aren't truly "global" (i.e., could hold only at particular times and/or places), then we have a potential problem of arbitrariness. I'm pretty sure this is a true generalization: All men born in Canada and typing an answer on December 27, 2014 in the city of Washington DC to a question about laws on askphilosophers are wearing cotton sweaters. On the other hand, I'm quite sure that it's not a law of nature and I can't imagine why anyone would think otherwise. You could just stipulate that all true generalizations are laws of nature, but that seems truly arbitrary, and in particular it seems to ignore all the reasons we think it's worth looking for laws of nature. So from a certain point of view, requiring that laws of nature can't be restricted to particular places or times seems like a way of avoiding rather than introducing arbitrariness. That said, it hardly follows that we would never have...

Here's a sort of rule-of-thumb answer that I find useful. Roughly, we should ask ourselves how surprising the evidence would be if the hypothesis were not true. Suppose the question is whether Harvey robbed the bank. Our evidence for Harvey being the thief is that a witness saw him outside the bank around the time of the robbery. If Harvey really is the robber, this isn't unlikely, but suppose Harvey works in the barber shop on the block where the bank is, and the time he was seen was a few minutes before opening time for the barber shop. Then seeing him outside the bank wouldn't be surprising even if he wasn't the robber. It's not strong evidence. On the other hand, suppose the evidence is that a search of Harvey's apartment turns up a large bag of bills whose serial numbers identify them as the ones that were stolen.Then things look bad for Harvey. If he wasn't the robber, it would be surprising to find the money in his apartment. (Of course, this isn't conclusive proof. Maybe someone has planted the...

Philosophical accounts of ethics (e.g., utilitarianism) are theoretical proposals. They are attempts to sum up right and wrong in tidy formulations. It might be that utilitarianism captures right and wrong perfectly, but this is controversial. It might be that the Categorical Imperative does the job. But this is controversial. And virtue ethics isn't an attempt to give a formula for summing up right and wrong, but rather discourages us from looking for rules of that sort. But whether we can understand morality fully in term of the virtues is controversial. My own guess is that each of these approaches (and by the way: there are others) provides genuine but incomplete insight. But this is controversial. Whether there are moral truths, however, is NOT the same question as whether any of these approaches to accounting for morality are correct. Thoughtful, intelligent human beings were making moral judgments long before philosophers cooked up their theories. Indeed, most...

My answer is bound to disappoint, but here goes anyway. The obvious options for proving that I'm telling the truth are 1) to give reasons for thinking what I say is actually true, 2) to give reasons for thinking that I'm honest and 3) to give people a basis for doubting their own reasons for doubting me. 1) The best way to prove that you're telling the truth is to give people good reasons to believe that what you're saying is actually true. Unfortunately, in some cases this is really hard. Suppose I really did hear John tell Mary that he planned to break into Sam's computer. That might really have happened, and I might have heard it. But I might not have any independent way of showing that John and Mary really had this conversation, and if it's my word against theirs, there's not a lot that I can do. 2) I might be able to provide evidence that I'm generally honest, and that I don't have any special motive for lying about John. That would help my case indirectly. It would tend to show that I'm...

It's an interesting question, and I think it's best considered the context of times and settings in which the idea of magic was taken seriously. I also doubt that there's a lot to be gained by looking for a full-blown definition, but we can learn something by looking at broad commonalities. First on the bit about magic words and rabbits. If it turned out that saying the right words in the right way could make rabbits appear in hats, then we would have discovered a new regularity in the world, though whether we had discovered a new law of physics is a lot more doubtful. After all, the regularities of the special sciences aren't usually classed as laws of physics, even though physics has to be consistent with them.* We might want to say that this regularity is "natural" because all the events take place in nature (saying the words, the rabbit appearing...) but it wouldn't follow that it wasn't magical. Older notions of magic explicitly included a concept of natural magic. What counted as ...