I agree that standard utilitarians would find it hard to justify retribution as such, that is, without appeal to such further effects as you mention: deterrence and satisfaction to injured parties. But I do not agree that this leaves many punishments without a utilitarian justification. The problem you see is that "it is easy to conceive of scenarios in which punishment does not act (1) as a deterrent to crime or (2) to relieve the suffering of any injured parties." In fact, I believe, this is not so easy. Let's start with (2). Suppose someone murders a man who was a bit of a loner and not much liked by the few people who knew him. He won't be missed. So it may seem that punishing the murderer won't give satisfaction to any injured parties because no one is really injured by the man's demise. But this overlooks that there are others who have lost a loved one to murder and others on whose life an attempt has been made. They, too, are injured parties -- not injured, to be sure, by the murderer of...

In a society where this faith is shared and influences political decisions in the direction of peace, justice, humanity, and equal citizenship, I see no problem. Problems arise when either of these two conditions are not satisfied. Faith can lead people to do terrible things, for instance torture and murder those with different religious beliefs. No one should let his or her faith exert such an influence. Rather, when one's religion seems to require conduct that seems wrong, then one ought to re-examine one's religion. This does not mean that one should abandon one's faith, though it may come to that in some cases. Another possible outcome is a reinterpretation of one's religion (for example, many Christian now understand that their faith did not really require the Inquisition). And one may also conclude, on reflection, that one's religion was right, after all, to require the conduct in question (as when Christians in Nazi Germany came to endorse their religious duty to engage in treasonable...

This question is really just about the ordinary meaning of the words or their most appropriate use. I would answer no on both grounds. There can certainly be situations where there is not one uniquely most rational decision. For example, the choice of either of two ties may be rational for a guy going in for an important interview. By choosing one of the two, he acts rationally. But it does not follow that it would have been irrational for him not to choose this tie. Had he chosen the other nice tie, he would also have acted rationally. I think one can give an affirmative answer if one reformulates your question a bit: If a person does not choose any of the conduct options that it would be rational for her to choose, does it follow that she is acting irrationally?

Sure, you can become a teacher of philosophy -- most plausibly in a college or university (with a PhD), or perhaps also in a highschool (with a MA). There's not much else, though, for professional philosophers. But then you can also choose another career and keep up with some of what philosophers do as a hobby....

Mad at whom? At yourself because you could have been at the concert at lower cost? But there was no way for you to know this: you cared about the opportunity and did what you needed to do to secure it. At the organizers? Maybe. But they have costs to cover, and it's nice of them to give away tickets that, presumably, they found they could not sell. Perhaps think of this analogy: If you buy health insurance and don't get sick, should you get mad that you paid while others, who also did not get sick, paid nothing? I think you should be grateful you didn't get sick and should not regret that you protected yourself against unforeseeable medical expenses. Likewise with the concert: You should be glad that you got to be there and should not regret that you secured yourself a place rather than leave your opportunity to chance by waiting.

There is a great influence, of course. But it is subtle and impossible to understand simply by reading ancient philosophers. It makes more sense for you to prepare yourself by reading contemporary works that give you a sense of how citizens in the affluent Western countries think about themselves, their relations to the rest of the world, their history, and the world's future. These contemporary works will be more accessible to you, because you understand much better the context in which they were written than you can hope to understand the context in which Plato wrote. And you can still, in a few years, do some study of the ancients if you are so inclined. For now, I would try to find a textbook collection of contemporary essays on ethics or political philosophy, and then learn about the debates we have here about affirmative action, the environment, equality for women, war, poverty, trade, and so on. (By the way, I would give analogous advice to a young Western student departing for a year in China. She...

I don't think geographical representation implies what you say it does. Its rationale could just as easily be that the legislature -- when deliberating about justice and the common good for all Americans -- should be fully informed of how its decisions would affect people in different parts of the country. Each legislator would then bring her or his special knowledge and understanding into the debate, but they all would decide on a common basis of what's best for all citizens. This would be, in my view, a much better system than the one we have, where legislators are beholden to the interests of their specific electorates and contributors (often actually more to the campaign contributors from outside their district than to ordinary people within their district). But it does not follow that you must therefore act in the interest of all citizens, impartially. You can say that, even if it were best if everyone were impartial, citizens and their political representatives are not in fact impartial and,...

I can think of two general ways in which someone might find your plan somewhat immoral. First, one might be concerned about the pain it might cause to your family, your parents and siblings, perhaps. Here you will obviously want to mitigate pain, explain to them how you feel, and so on. They know you well already, so will presumably understand to some extent. They may still prefer to have you around and in the swing of things, but here I think your own ambitions can legitimately trump. Second, one might say that, being bright and born into a reasonably privileged position, you ought to do something for people worse off than youself. But you can do some of this without much interaction: through writing or donations, or in many other ways. (It's hard to be specific here, because you do not say much about how you plan to get by in Europe or wherever you may settle down.) In short, I don't think you would do wrong to shun close friendships, intimacy, marriage. You have responsibilities toward...

Suppose that by mailing in a postcard you could get a 1 in 10 chance to direct $10,000 to a good cause: an orphenage, say, or a promising development project in Africa. Would you mail the postcard? I suppose you would. You would say that a 1 in 10 chance of $10,000 is worth about as much as $1000 for certain. So this is very much worth a postage stamp. Now consider the same question in regard to a 1 in 20 chance of being able to direct $20,000 to a good cause. The probability that it will work out is smaller, to be sure, but the good it would do is correspondingly larger. So again it would seem that you have very strong reason to mail that postcard. Voting in the US election comes rather later in this chain. Your chance of affecting the result is very small, but the payoff is correspondingly larger. The difference between a good and a bad US President is huge for a generation of human beings and possibly future ones as well. So don't be fooled by the small probability; it isn't zero. And do not...

Some of your difficulty -- very reminiscient of Leibniz, by the way -- may be caused by the word "different." Take a very simple case, two water molecules perhaps. Are they different? In one sense, they are exactly the same. Yet in another sense they are different or (perhaps better) distinct. You can tell that they are not the same in this second sense by counting: there are two, not one. And you can tell this, in turn, by attending to their space-time locations. Similarly with your more complicated example. At any given time, there are two distinct locations at which a human being with this DNA is located: you at one place and your clone at the other. If he is living on earth, he's likely to be a bit different from you due to what the two of you have eaten and experienced. But he may be living on a planet that is an exact replica of this one, and his life may then mirror yours exactly with him thinking and doing exactly what you think and do, perhaps even simultaneously. He would still be distinct...