It may also matter what sort of operation we are talking about. If this is cosmetic surgery (beautifying belly buttons, say), then the service does seem quite similar to other commodities (face cream), and the reasons against the surgeon's charging what she will seem quite weak. As we move to the other end of the spectrum -- to operations that are a matter of life and death -- Peter Fosl's points become ever more compelling. Such operations should not be rationed on the basis of wealth: A medically important operation that is routinely available to the wealthy should also be available, in roughly the same quality, to the poor. Call this the medical equity principle (MEP). It does not follow from the MEP (here comes my second point) that it is unethical for the best surgeons to charge more. Societies that have organized themselves around the MEP need to have enough high-quality doctors to take care of the medical needs of all. To attract people into the profession of surgeon, and to entice them...

Doctors try to avoid such situations, and, I think, for good reason. They add extra stress to what is already a difficult task -- stress for the surgeon and also stress for the patient. Such extra stress, in turn, is likely to diminish the prospects for success. And a surgeon who performs a major operation on his mother may then be acting unethically by not giving his patient the best chances of a successful outcome. If so, he should step aside, even if his mother would prefer to be operated by him. But what if some surgeon is, and is known by his mother to be, especially cool and unemotional, thus adding no stress to the proceedings? Or what if he is much better than the other available surgeons so that his greater skill more than makes up for the extra stress? In such cases, I would think, there's nothing unethical about him doing the operation himself -- provided, of course, his mother agrees. So, as I see it, performing a surgical operation on a loved one is not unethical as such, it is...

I would read Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , perhaps with Reading Rorty as a companion text. It's a very rewarding text.

From what we know, the answer would seem to be yes. The effects of small events like the one you describe will reverberate through our modern traffic, trade, and communications systems and will have a slight impact on the schedules of many people (probably excepting only those who die shortly after your drive). In many case, this impact will suffice to affect the DNA of future persons, which depends on which one of any man's 20 million functional sperm cells (per ejaculation) will get a role in reproduction. As time goes on, you can be increasingly confident that, had you not taken your drive, none of the people who is in fact be born would have been born without it. A few years down the road, all newborn human beings, animals, etc., will owe their existence to your little outing. And these beings will be displacing a similar multitude of beings who would have been born then if you had not taken that drive.

Such language is demeaning, as you say. It demeans women in general and members of that group in particular. It would be better if such words fell into disuse. When young women use such words in reference to themselves, it is important to understand why. Is it lack of self-respect? Is it preemptive (they feel that others refer to them in this way and want to show that they don't care)? Or something else? An effort to explore this question with your girlfriend may be preferable to simply asking her to stop. It's more respectful (less controlling) and also offers the prospect of overcoming the underlying problem rather than merely its most obvious symptom.

Kant better not say this. If everyone remained childless, then there would be no new babies either. So, by the same token, Kant would be condemning his own decision to remain childless. A good way of showing how remaining childless can be seen as permissible on Kant's ground is to interpret the categorical imperative as asking whether one can will not the universal adoption , but rather the universal availability of one's maxim. In a world in which enough children are born by to those who want to have children, I can will my maxim of remaining childless to be universally available: Even if everyone who wants to adopt this maxim does so, humanity will still continue. Applying this interpretation of the categorical imperative to homosexuality, it turns out that homosexuality is likewise permissible. Even if I cannot will humankind to go extinct, I can will the universal availability of a homosexual life: There are enough heterosexuals who want to have children to propagate the human race...

Let's begin by distinguishing two senses in which something might be said to be unknowable. In some cases something is said to be unknowable because it isn't the kind of thing about which, in principle, knowledge could be had. For example, do you know the minimum number of hairs a man must have on his head to escape being bald? Well, there is no such minimum number to be known or discovered, because the concept of baldness is too vague for this. Do you know what time of day it is now on the sun (Wittgenstein)? Would you be happier dead? Again, there's nothing to be known or discovered in these regards. Philosophers have said about such cases that "there is no fact of the matter." Let us set these cases aside, because they are not the ones that interest you. In the cases that interest you, there is a fact of the matter. And the claim is then either that it is impossible for us (human beings including all future generations) to know this fact or even, more dramatically, that it is in principle...

You are right that the generalizing argument you criticize is invalid. The claim that some particular act is permissible cannot be defeated merely by pointing out that this act falls under a more general type and that not all acts of this type are permissible. The argument involves two kinds of generalization. It generalizes from one particular agent (token) to a type of agent and it generalizes from one particular act (token) to a type of act. Yesterday, I encountered someone who ordered me to open my bag. I could have asked her many generalizing questions: Do you think that any middle-aged woman may give orders to others? Do you think that any New Yorker may go through other people's luggage? And so on. It's absurd to think that the answer to all such questions must be affirmative for her conduct to be permissible. This shows that, when challenged by a generalizing question, one always has at least two options. One can try to support an affirmative answer, or one can reject the...

It is true that, once a person has been executed, she is no longer around to suffer the loss of years she might otherwise have lived. But the point of an execution is not to punish the person after she's dead, but before. She is subjected to the experience of living on death row and later to the experience of being killed in the execution chamber; and she must expect all along that many things she cared for are less likely to thrive or to come to fruition. You might respond that this answer works only for people who know about their impending execution. What about someone who is killed painlessly in her sleep? Could this ever be construed as a punishment? We can give an affirmative answer if we think of punishment in a somewhat extended sense as the setting back of a person's interests. Suppose you have given offense to someone and, in order to punish you, he has been embezzling money from your account. Being an affluent entrepreneur, you never notice the losses (you rather take your business to...

The easiest way to think of this may be in terms of some regular relation between time and the size of the universe. Expressing this regular relation as some mathematical formula, it may turn out that, going back from the present in accordance with this formula, we get to a past point of time at which the size of the universe is zero. We would have reason to postulate such a starting point as the origin of the universe if all we know about the universe supports or is at least consistent with our backward extrapolation. Big bang theorists believe that this is (by and large) the case. The same mathematical formula may be such that, going forward from the present, we get to a future point of time at which the size of the universe is zero once more. We would have reason to postulate such an end point of the universe if all we know about the universe supports or is at least consistent with our forward extrapolation. There are other conceivable end-of-time scenarios. The amount of stuff in the...