Well, there is such a formula, actually, the so-called clear and present danger test . This goes back to an opinion Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes composed in regard to the case Schenk v. United States (1919). Schenk was general secretary of the American Socialist Party and had been convicted under the Espionage Act with inciting young men not to enlist for World War I. The Court rejected his appeal, judging, in the words of Holmes, that Schenk's "words create a clear and present danger that they will bring about substantive evils Congress has a right to prevent." Holmes likened Schenk's utterance to that of someone fortuitously shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. Subsequent jurisprudence narrowed the test in the direction of requiring that the danger, to count as "present," must be imminent. This undermined Holmes's analogy: The cry of "fire" creates an immediate danger, while Schenk's 15,000 leaflets could not have undermined the US war effort except over a considerable time...

Not a bad question. But too big fully to answer here, especially because there is so much debate about this among philosophers. So let me just give a brief structural outline. There are two main questions philosophers have addressed: What distinguished persons from non-persons? And what makes this person at one time the same person as that person at another time? On the first question, capacities or faculties have figured prominently. Some are theoretical or cognitive capacities such as, in particular, self-consciousness (awareness of oneself as distinct from other physical objects and thinking beings). Others are practical or moral capacities such as, in particular, the capacity to act morally even when doing so goes against one's self-interest and inclinations. Once a philosopher has argued for an account of the capacities that are necessary and jointly sufficient for personhood, one can then work out whether some higher animals may qualify and whether infants, the senile, some humans...

One might say that a person causes the property kind to be instantiated when she decides to perform a kind act: She causes there to be a kind act. But we cannot really say anything like this about static objects. The stone does not cause heaviness to be instantiated, the relationship between stone and heaviness is too close for this. Something heavy comes into existence together with the stone. The stone does not cause its own existence, so it does not cause the instantiation of the property heavy. Now a tomato is unlike a stone in that it changes (its color turns from green to red) and also unlike a person in that it does not make decisions about how to be. The latter discrepancy seems to me less significant when we are speaking about causality. Considering a tomato plant we can, I believe, say both that it causally produces fruits that eventually mature to the point where they are red (thus causes the property red to be instantiated) and also that it instantiates this property ...

If I understand well the number you have in mind, 2^2^2^2^2^2, it is not all that large: 2 2^2 = 4 4^2 = 16 16^2=256 256^2=65,536 65,536^2=4,294,967,296 The person you heard this from may have had another number in mind, namely: 2^(2^(2^(2^(2^2)))). Let's construct this one: 2 2^2 = 4 2^4 = 16 2^16 = 65,536 2^65,536 = ??? .... and this fifth step (bringing in the fifth "2") already goes beyond most ordinary spreadsheets and calculators. Still, since 2^10 is about 10^3, we can estimate the result to be around 10^19661, i.e. a "1" with nearly 20,000 zeros. A good computer could probably do the calculation and could print out the resulting number on perhaps 12 pages or so. The sixth step, taking 2 to the power of this number, would really go beyond what most of us can even imagine. It would bring us to a number -- let's call it "K" in your honor -- that, written in the decimal notation, would have so many digits that this number of...

With regard to both questions, I understand you as imagining that objects are longer or shorter in all dimensions (not merely in one dimension). So spheres would still be spheres, except larger or smaller ones. Right? On your first question, this is not possible if we hold fixed the laws of nature holding in this universe. To illustrate: In your Twin Solar System, scaled up by a factor of 2, Twin Earth would have eight times as much mass, and gravity near its surface would be roughly twice as great (surface gravity is proportional to the planet's mass divided by the square of it radius). Like the Earth, a scaled-up object would have eight times as much mass, so the gravitational force acting on it (its weight) would be 16 times greater. Now imagine this object suspended by a string. This string would be thicker in two dimensions, hence four times stronger. But the object's weight would be 16 times greater! So, on Earth, the string may be sufficiently strong to support the object even while on Twin...

Yes, it makes sense to see these two cases as parallel. But in doing so I would disagree with your first and agree with your second suggestion. I would agree that freedom of the press and free speech are more important that the maintenance of the taboos in question: Our countries should outlaw neither cartoons that insult the prophet of Islam nor works that glorify the Nazis or deny the holocaust. But this claim is distinct from your first suggestion namely that citizens of our countries should break the relevant taboos. I do not think that people ought to glorify the Nazis, ought to deny the holocaust, or ought to publish cartoons that insult revered figures of other religions. In fact, I think they ought to refrain from doing such things (though, to repeat, doing them should be legally permissible). We might then distinguish four classes of expressions: (1) those that ought to be outlawed and are morally wrong; (2) those that ought to be legal and are morally wrong; (3) those that ought...

A very nice classic essay on this question is "The Conscience of Huck Finn" by Jonathan Bennett. I think you'll find it congenial and responsive to your second and third questions especially. I found a version on the internet: http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/jfb/huckfinn.pdf

That an ideal is achieved is no more impossible in principle than that a concept is instantiated or exemplified. In the latter case, we find something in the world that has all the properties that are definitive of the concept -- e.g., all the properties something must have to count as a plate. To be sure, such a thing, i.e. a plate, is not a concept -- it merely realizes a concept. Now why can't we think about ideals in this way as well? Think of your ideal of the perfect professor, and fill this in with all the properties such a professor would have. Then see whether you can find (or create) such a person in the real world. If you achieve this, you'd have an exemplification or instantiation of the ideal professor. But this professor would not be the ideal, s/he would be one realization of it. This is obvious from the fact that the actual professor would have many additional properties over and above those s/he must have to be an ideal professor (e.g., a height, weight, gender, etc., which...

I think the terms in your first question are generally used in a sense that's relative to our (human) knowledge. But this need not mean that this use reflects our ignorance of causes. For there may be real chance and randomness in nature (here the words "real" and "in nature" indicate that "chance" and"randomness" are used in their more unusual sense). The currently accepted view in physics holds that this is in fact the case at least in regard to subatomic particles. The word "infinite" is generally used to refer to what really is infinite, mostly things in mathematics and geometry (the set of all natural numbers, Euclidean space). The mere fact that we don't know whether a thing has limits does not justify calling it infinite in any normal sense.

Terrorist acts can be considered art, surely. I know an artist who, when he saw the WTC burning from his loft window, thought this was art (namely the filming of a movie). But his judgment was based on a factual error. So you might ask: What may rightly be considered art? I think the best answer to this question now is that there is no good answer, no boundary between art and non-art (see my response to question 865). To be sure, we might consider in very bad taste an invitation to consider as art a terrorist attack in which innocent civilians died. But much of what is treated as art (exhibited in museums, sold in gallaries) is widely considered to be in bad taste -- and defended as expanding the consciousness of a complacent public. And similarly for other properties that one might think disqualify something from being art. For any such property, or combination of such properties, there seem to be things with these properties that are considered art.