May I refer you to my answer to question 1114? I fully agree with you that organs could save lives, very many lives each year, not to speak of health improvements. But nearly all of this problem can be solved rather easily by reversing the standard default. Instead of assuming that a person who dies without leaving specific instructions does not want his or her organs to be used, we should stipulate the opposite. We should institute easy and convenient ways for people to register their veto against the posthumous use of their organs. And we should then assume that all who have not registered such a veto are consenting to the posthumous use of their organs for saving the lives or restoring the health of other people. This simple change in the law would give us the needed organs without the problems I discuss in the response to Q1114.

The common domain these three predicates range over is that of states of affairs consisting of objects that have certain specific properties or stand in certain specific relations. Being conceivable is the easiest condition to meet. It excludes only states of affairs that we cannot think or imagine. We cannot imagine a stone that is green all over and also red all over, a stone that occupies the same space as a clump of metal, a bachelor who is married, a living horse that's not an animal, and so on. While there is a narrow sense of "possible" that coincides with "conceivable," usually being possible is a more demanding condition. To be possible, a state of affairs must not merely be conceivable, but must be consistent with what we know about this world (e.g., the laws of nature). A puddle of water turning into a human being, an animal living forever, a daytrip to another galaxy -- these are conceivable, but not possible. Being probable is more demanding still, requiring not merely that states of...

Let me add two thoughts to this. One may distinguish between theoretical and practical rationality. The former employs reason in the service of improving one's understanding and beliefs toward clarity and truth. The latter employs reason toward formulating and achieving ends. Much of the problem you highlight is illuminated by this distinction. Sometimes progress toward clarity and truth hampers our achievement of what we want and have reason to want. For example, when you have a dangerous disease, or find yourself in a life raft without water, you may employ your theoretical rationality to figure out what your chances of survival are. Employing your practical rationality, however, you might conclude that such researches would probably be depressing and would in any case distract you from your goal of getting over the emergency. The practically rational thing might be simply to assume that you can survive this and to throw your full effort into the most plausible option you've got. Beliefs...

In colloquial speech there are some apparent tautologies that are used to make a substantive point that can be disputed. There is the famous Yogi Berra saying "it's not over till it's over" used to make the (disputable) claim that the team behind can still catch up. And there is "boys are boys" expressing the (very disputable) claim that its pointless to work toward decent behavior by men in matters sexual.

I can see three plausible connections. The lives of many of the victims are blighted by their traumatic experiences. Even if money cannot undo this damage, it can brighten the lives of the victims. It can do so by enabling them to afford therapy and counseling, for instance, or simply a more worry-free existence in which they don't have to think twice about a movie ticket or a fancy birthday present for their children. In such ways, the money makes the victims' lives less dire than they would otherwise have been. There can be great symbolic value in receiving an official acknowledgement and apology. This can be given without money, to be sure. But if the Archdiocese had been let off with a simple apology, the victims might well have felt that the gravity of the long string of offences (enabled by decades of official indifference far beyond this archdiocese) had been overlooked. The large sum appropriately symbolizes to the entire country the enormity of the crime, how the church has allowed...

One needs a bit more detail here. Guessing at what interests you, let me fill this in. Let's assume the children were granted a proper visa, for instance a student visa after having been admitted to a university in C. They have started their study, and their parentage now comes to light. Should their visa be revoked, and they be deported? An argument in favor is that they are enjoying privileges that are denied to most of their compatriots. Letting them enjoy study here affords them an unfair advantage. On the other hand, lots of other foreigners study here; so, while these kids are unfairly advantaged vis-a-vis their peers from X, they are not unfairly advantaged vis-a-vis many other young people. Sending them home while students from other countries are allowed to stay may look like punishing them for the crimes of their parents. Such punishment, if this is what it is, can have its advantages, of course. It puts the rulers of X (and the rulers of other countries as well) on notice that, if...

Maybe yes, if you unreflectively act to promote your own enjoyment and to avoid unpleasantness for yourself. But this condition may not be fulfilled. One example is that of a person who has worked hard to become someone who takes deep pleasure in the (morally appropriate) happiness of others. Philosophers as different as Aristotle and Kant agree that we can and ought to promote such a disposition in ourselves -- Aristotle because he believed this to be a necessary element of true virtue, Kant because he believed this would avoid temptations that could lead the agent to fail in her duties. Another example is that of a person who finds that helping others is what she most enjoys doing, but who also reflects on this enjoyment and conscientiously approves of it in moral terms. Had she found that sadistic conduct is what she most enjoys, she would have restrained herself and tried to change her own desires insofar as possible. In both these case, the enjoyment conferred by the helping act is...

You should distinguish here between the inductive method of extrapolating from observed cases to as yet unobserved cases, on the one hand, and particular extrapolations derived by using this method, on the other hand. Particular extrapolations are a posteriori. They depend on what has actually been observed. The method, however, has certain a priori elements, esp. in the very “clean” and somewhat artificial stories you will have encountered in your statistics class. One such story might be this. You are faced with a large urn which you know contains many marbles all of which you know to be either white or red. On n occasions one marble was randomly selected from the urn, its color was recorded, and it was then mixed back in. Of these randomly selected marbles, 70 percent were white and 30 percent red. At the end of the story, you are then asked what we can learn from the random drawings about the color composition of the marbles in the urn. In this...

There is indeed a tension between capital punishment and the teachings of Christ. One can ease this tension somewhat by highlighting the contribution of penal institutions to the protection of innocent people, who are safer when criminals are taken off the street and potential criminals deterred. This does not justify the death penalty, nor our kind of prisons in which inmates are routinely raped and abused, but it does help justify penal institutions of the kind we know from the more civilized states. I see much greater tensions between Christian teaching and many other policies we pursue, especially internationally. We pressure very poor countries to undertake “structural adjustment programs” -- cutting public funding and raising fees for basic education and health care -- so that they can better service their loans to our banks, which loans are often taken out by brutal dictators who use the money we lend them to buy the arms they needed to stay in power. We allow our banks to help such tyrants and...

The American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce posed this question in a slightly different form when he expressed his belief that some (at least one) of his beliefs are false. Each of us has strong inductive evidence for the analogous belief -- we've all found ourselves compelled to give up a belief as false, and many times. So we have reason to expect that this will happen again. We have reason to believe that some of our beliefs will turn out to be (and thus are) false -- or, in any case, this is what nearly all of us actually believe. This belief does not commit us to the conclusion that any of our beliefs may (turn out to) be false. But it does commit us to the conclusion that some of our beliefs may (turn out to) be false. To exemplify, take 15 modestly difficult geography questions: about ordering Australia, Brazil, and India by size of area, ordering Japan, Indonesia, and Vietnam by population, ordering Amazon, Mississippi-Missouri, and Nile by length, and so on. There...