In more than one way, the answer is yes. It's clear that psychologically, as it were, positive numbers are more basic; we learn to count before we learn to subtract, for instances, and even when we learn to subtract, the idea of a negative number takes longer to catch onto. Also, the non-negative numbers were part of mathematics long before the full set of integers were. (In fact, treating zero as a number came later than treating 1, 2, 3... as numbers. Also, we can start with the positive numbers and define the set of all integers. The positive numbers are usually called the natural numbers in mathematics, and N is the usual symbol for the natural numbers. The integers Z are sets of ordered pairs of natural numbers on the usual definition. The integer that "goes with" the natural number 1 is the set of pairs {(1,2), (2,3), (3,4), 4,5)...} (By "goes with" I mean it's the integer that, when we're through with the construction, we can in effect, treat as the same thing as the natural...

Let's stipulate: adultery isn't always immoral. You're pitching the idea that it's usually not immoral ("mostly moral," as you put it.) Your argument, however, doesn't seem to me to be strong enough for that conclusion. Start with something obvious: when people get married, they make promises to one another. Typically, one of those promises is a promise of faithfulness. Not all promises are binding in all circumstances, but in general promise-breaking isn't morally trivial. And encouraging people to break promises isn't trivial either. But set that aside. Let's suppose that adultery is the result of a biological urge, as you say. Since morality often calls for us not to act on our urges, that doesn't tell us much. Your legal/sociological analysis strikes me as a bit thin, but I'm more worried about this: "Making it with a married woman can be very thrilling and the same woman would not be equally exciting if she were single; the supposedly unavailable is always more desirable than the easily...

In both the legal and the familiar sense of the word "murderer," the answer is no. You certainly wouldn't be charged with murder in a case like this, and if you were, successfully arguing that you didn't actually kill the person but merely allowed them to die would lead to a "not guilty" verdict. Murder, as it's usually understood, is unlawful killing or, in the non-legal sense, morally unjustified killing . That said, someone might argue that if you're in a position to save someone's life and you don't, then you're guilty of something just as bad as murder. No doubt we can come up with hypothetical cases where this might be so. For instance: Alex intends to kill Bob; he's got the means and the will. But on his way to do the deed, he discovers Bob unconscious and bleeding by the side of the road. Suppose it's clear that Alex could save him; calling 911 and staunching his wound until help arrives would do. But Alex does nothing except wait for Bob to breathe his last. In this case, we might say...

A good question. The nub of the matter is this: if something is moving literally at light speed, then the amount of time between two points along its trajectory, measured in its frame, is 0. So your hunch is right in one way: at light speed (along the edge of a light cone), time doesn't pass. However, if we try to accelerate a massive body (for example, a spaceship) to light speed, we'll fail. Close enough for present purposes, the reason is that as the body accelerates, it takes on mass, and that mass approaches infinity as the speed approaches c . So your space traveler will never arrive at "frozen" time.

I think it's a bit optimistic to say that physicists are close to proving the existence of a multiverse, but we can set that aside. There are different ideas of a multiverse in physical theory, but none of the ones that cosmologists take seriously call for showing that literally every possible "universe" exists. Rather, what's at stake is the idea that the totality of the Universe writ large contains relatively isolated sub-parts that have many of the characteristics of the physical universe as we usually think of it. In particular, the values of various physical "constants" would vary across the different sub-universes. But the important point for your question is that this is entirely about physics and has nothing to do with God. God, as usually understood, is not a physical being at all, but a being who (among other things) underwrites the existence of physical things. God doesn't exist within this or any other physical universe on the usual theological view. Put it another way: if the God...

Just to add a bit to what my fellow panelists have said (all of which seems right to me.) Even if God can't be seen or heard or touched in ordinary sensory ways, many believers would claim that they have experiences of God. There's a vast literature on this topic, but one interesting recent contribution is by the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann: her book When God Talks Back gives a detailed account of how some people, as they understand it, learn to experience God. You can read a brief synopsis HERE (Scroll way down if the page appears not to load properly.) You might say that these people are mistaken, and you might (or might not) be right. You might say that they are deluded, but unless you simply mean "mistaken," the word "deluded" doesn't add anything. There's no reason to believe that such believers are mentally ill by any reasonable criterion. As it happens, I'm not a theist. But over the years, I've come to the conclusion that many atheists have a mistaken picture of the...

Holism is a pretty puzzling concept. I'm not sure the bit about "defined as wholes" necessarily gets it. Suppose I have a chair and I break one of the legs. Then I can't use it as a chair anymore, but if there's a holism here, it seems to be a thin variety. Unless we insist that spatial relations are automatically holistic, then for something to be a chair, it suffices for it to be made up of parts that have a certain spatial configuration. Of course, we single out chairs among various possible configurations because they suit certain of our purposes, but an intact chair seems to me to be no more or less a "whole" than a chair with a missing leg. The broken chair isn't a whole chair , but there doesn't seem to be much metaphysical significance there. Here's the only case I can think of that seems to me a clear case of holism. In classical physics, the state of a whole physical system is just the aggregate, so to speak of the states of the parts. If we're given the position and the momentum of...

I don't know how much older you are than the women you watch with, and I don't know anything about the larger situation. I don't know why you aren't picking companions closer to your own age, and I don't know anything about the young women and your relationship with them. What I'd think in detail would depend on all that. But generalizations about "society" are typically pretty vapid. Does "society" mean "most people?" How do you know? Do you have any real evidence as opposed to impressions, anecdotes and a look at website comments by high-schoolers? And most important, what does this have to do with whether you should be doing what you're doing ? We can agree that the high-schoolers should have kept their comments to themselves. We can also agree, at least for argument's sake, that a 19-year-old could make a clear-eyed, responsible decision to make a porn. But that's not the issue. The issue is how you should be dealing with the particular young women you're talking about, in the particular...

Let's start with the phrase "ruin one's own sense of the aesthetic." There might be different ways to interpret that, but the reading that first occurred to me was something like "undermine one's ability to appreciate things aesthetically" or perhaps "undermine one's ability to make sound aesthetic judgements." In either case, the question isn't just philosophical. It's partly a matter of what the actual psychological effects of being surrounded by beautiful—or ugly—things actually is. And although we might have guesses about the answers, our guesses might not be good ones. With due regard for the fact that philosophers can't really answer the question, however, we can still ask some rather more conceptual questions. What about aesthetic value might suggest that being surrounded by ugly things could ruin our aesthetic sensibilities? One possible reason is that if we're surrounded by ugliness, we may have trouble noticing things that are beautiful or in some other way aesthetically rewarding....

What you say about the individual problems is right: if I get a point for each right answer, then each time someone comes to the site, the best strategy is to guess that it's a man. (At least this is right if knowing the sex of an individual customer doesn't help predict whether s/he will visit the site or not.) This is the best strategy because if each individual visit is like a random selection of a customer from the population, the chance is greater that the selected customer will be a man. The analogy with seawater is problematic. After all, if I pick one customer, that customer won't be 55% male and 45% female. The salinity of small samples of seawater closely approximates the salinity of the sea (unless we get down to really small samples of a few molecules, and then your principle breaks down.) The make-up of a small sample from a population may depart markedly from the make-up of the populations. What's interesting is that once our samples get to be of even a moderate size, things...