On your first question, in its general form: No, it is not the case that you should do as much as you can to make right what you believe is wrong. First, there are wrongs that you can make right only by committing serious wrongs of your own. Second, your resources (time, money, energy) are limited, and it is simply impossible for you to do as much as you can with regard to every wrong you perceive. (For example, doing all you can to make right a trivial wrong may prevent you from making right a much greater wrong.) Third, you are not morally required to do all you can to right the wrongs of the world you live in -- some wrongs are not your responsibility (e.g., a blatant injustice in the Danish tax code), and you are morally entitled to devote some of your resources to things other than the righting of wrongs. Fourth, you may not be sure that what you believe to be wrong is wrong, and you may then have reason not to act on your judgment. (For example, when many people whose judgment you respect do not...

A nice triplet of examples! Let's say that a person is hypocritical just in case s/he (a) publicly endorses a normative position (such as a moral principle or value or norm or end) as valid for all and also (b) deliberately contravenes this normative position. Your physician may not be hypocritical on this account. Yes, he deliberately contravenes the instruction he gives to you. But he may not be endorsing this instruction as valid for all. Here are some possibilities: (1) He endorses the instruction as valid only for those who seek to be in good health, he assumes that you are among these people (why else would you be going to the doctor?), and he is not himself among them. When charged with hypocrisy, he then responds that he is no more hypocritical than a travel agent who advises you to spend a few days in Paris even though she would never travel overseas. (2) He may endorse the instruction as valid only for those who are still young or as valid only for those for whom quitting would not...

Most citizens, nearly all, disagree with some government expenditures. They think it's wrong to tax us for agricultural or opera subsidies, for drug rehabilitation, for foreign aid, for nuclear weapons, or a few thousand other things. Now we could all cheat on our taxes, each retaining from what we legally owe the proportion that corresponds to expenditures of which s/he disapproves (or disapproves on moral grounds). Or we could defer to governmental expenditure decisions reached through our democratic political process. Once the issue is presented in this more general way, it is clear that there is moral reason to comply with majority decisions one disapproves of -- even morally disapproves of. In a democracy, if you find laws or policies morally objectionable, you ought to present your arguments to your fellow citizens and persuade them to change such laws and policies with you. To be sure, such efforts often fail. But the whole point of democracy is that we defer to majority decisions. Without...

This sort of case satisfies three conditions: Contemporary Vs enjoy considerably superior starting positions and life conditions than contemporary Gs. The starting positions and life conditions of contemporary Gs and Vs are profoundly affected by the historical wrongs committed by earlier Vs against earlier Gs. And it would be impossible surgically to correct the wrongs (in the way one might correct a recent theft by restoring the stolen object to its rightful owner). In such cases, I would think that justice makes at least these two demands: Starting positions and life conditions are to be made roughly equal between the two groups. And very poor and very inferior (to the V+G average) starting positions are to be avoided insofar as this is reasonably possible. To be sure, justice may well make the second demand independently of historical wrongs. But I think the moral reasons for avoiding starting positions and living conditions that are avoidably very poor in absolute or relative terms become...

You need to distinguish between the question of what is morally right/wrong and the question of what is generally taken to be right/wrong at some specific time. Slavery was never morally correct but, at most, it was generally taken to be so. (Compare: The earth was never actually the center of the universe, but merely generally taken to be so.) The first question belongs to philosophy; philosophers try to work out what is morally right/wrong, just/unjust, ethical/unethical. The second question is addressed by many different disciplines: by social historians, as you say, but also by anthropologists, sociologists, economists, psychologists, brain physiologists, evolutionary biologists, and others as well. Philosophers have addressed it in some of these ways -- e.g., Marx within his theory of history and Nietzsche from a psychological perspective in his Genealogy of Morals . But philosophers also address the second question as philosophers, namely when the analyze changes in prevalent moral...

Professor George's conclusion is probably true, but the reasoning seems to me invalid. This is so, because the two "pairing" operations produce different pairs. For example, the first operation might create the pair <"Bush is married"; "it is not the case that Bush is married">. The second operation might create the pair <"it is not the case that Bush is married"; "it is not the case that it is not the case that Bush is married">. The first operation finds one unique false claim for every true one -- but some false claims are left over (for example, "3+3=9") . The second operation finds one unique true claim for every false one -- but some true claims are left over (for example, "3+3=6"). Therefore, the argument works only if it can be shown that the two sets of "left-over" claims are equal in number of members. One might try to avoid this problem by redefining Professor George's operations so that any claim that begins with an odd number of iterations of "it is not that case that" gets paired with...

The answer depends on what you take morality -- that which moral philosophers are seeking to pin down -- to be . Some philosophers take morality to be a timeless system of norms and values that covers all agents in all possible worlds. Others take morality to be a pragmatic construction that helps human contemporaries to settle their differences peacefully. (These are not the only two options, to be sure, but they are indicative of a spectrum of extant conceptions of morality.) On the former conception of morality, even the most bizarre imagined intelligent life forms can furnish examples and counter-examples. On the latter conception, even the question what our obligations would be if there were only 5 million human beings living on this planet might be rejected as irrelevant and distracting on the ground that the world is not, and will never again be, so thinly populated. Note that the difference between the two conceptions of morality I have distinguished concerns the larger life world or...

Yes; and I would distinguish two kinds of such aesthetic appreciation. Some philosophers are very good writers, and it is simply wonderful to read them -- some of my favorites are Plato, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Bernard Williams. And in some cases the problem posed or argument presented is stunning in the unity, elegance, or sublimity it attains. I would once more list Plato and Hobbes as examples here, but also some of the less appealing writers such as Kant (e.g., the second analogy of experience) or Rawls (the thought experiment of the original position). This latter kind of aesthetic appreciation is closely related to recognizing a work as philosophically powerful.

There are various papers addressing Singer's argument directly, and they are easy to find. More interesting, perhaps, are more indirect responses that downplay the universalistic claims of morality in favor of special moral ties to friends and associates as well as non-moral commitments. The first of these responses is well exemplified in Samuel Scheffler's Boundaries and Allegiances (especially perhaps the essays "Families, Nations, and Strangers" and "The Conflict between Justice and Responsibility"). The second response is elegantly instantiated in the work of Bernard Williams -- for example in his collection Moral Luck (especially perhaps the essay "Persons, Character, and Morality"). One of Williams' memorable formulations is: "There can come a point at which it is quite unreasonable for a man to give up, in the name of the impartial good ordering of the world of moral agents, something which is a condition of his having any interest in being around in this world at all" ( Moral Luck , page 4)....

More than on your preferences, the answers also depend on the kind of students you face and on the legal system within which they serve. In light of my limited knowledge of these and other relevant matters, I would suggest you focus on leading your students to think philosophically about the law. For example, what moral authority do those in government have to enforce laws against non-consenters? What must the government be like, and what must the laws it is enforcing be like, for such enforcement to be morally permissible? And under what conditions does the mere fact that something is the law give citizens a moral (as opposed to a merely prudential) reason to act accordingly? These sort of questions and reflections are crucial, I think, for students to appreciate the conceptual gap between the law and justice -- a gap that is often deliberately obscured, as when the government agency in charge of law enforcement is called the Department of Justice (its recent head in the US, Attorney General...