It's very easy to speculate about the evolutionary origins of a trait, but often very difficult to defend such speculations with evidence. Natural selection is not the only engine of evolutionary change. So there's no particular reason to think that our capacity for aesthetic pleasure is an adaptation, rather than, say, a by-product of some other trait that is an adaptation, or a "spandrel" -- a feature that is the result of physical constraints on the structure or sub-structure of the organism. (Remember that in order for there to be natural selection, there has to be variation. If there's only one way that natural law permits a cognitive or affective structure to develop, then everyone would be the same.) There are also stochastic processes to consider: genetic drift, or founder effects (some desert-landscape lovers went and settled on an island, while all the desert-landscape haters suffered catastrophe on the mainland.) It's very difficult to figure out what kind of evidence or reasoning could...

The idea behind many sporting competitions is to equalize the physical attributes of the competitors as much as possible, so that skill can be the deciding factor. This is why there are weight classes in wrestling and boxing, and handicapping in horse racing and in golf. Since women are, on average, physically different from men in lots of ways that are relevant to lots of sports -- e.g, tennis, basketball, track & field events -- it has seemed reasonable to separate men and women into separate competition classes for those sports. Automobile racing doesn't implicate physical skills that vary systematically between men and women, so there are no gender divisions there. There are also some fairness considerations: using classes within sports gives more people the opportunity to play. If there were no classes, then men who currently box in lightweight divisions would nearly always lose, and sports like basketball and track & field, even at the high school level, would be virtually devoid of women....

Your question contains a false presupposition, viz., that "the only way to avoid [privileging yourself] is to only choose for the other person." If one wanted to be scrupulously impartial, one would have to treat all persons as having an equal moral claim on you. But you are yourself a person -- so you are among those who have a moral claim. So the best way to implement impartiality would be by doing a lottery in which you also hold a ticket; deciding, in other words, through some random procedure who should get the benefit of your moral concern in a given instance. The point is important, and one that is stressed by both rules-theorists (or deontologists ) like Kant, and consequentialists, like Mill. For Kant, it is the fact that human beings have the capacity for reason that makes them appropriate objects of moral concern. Since you have the capacity for reason, you are precisely as morally valuable as anyone else. You thus have duties to yourself , and it would be as much a...

I can't comment on Alan Soble's intriguing suggestion that one can have sex by taking up a philosophical position (can one become a philosopher by taking up a sexual position?), but I would like to suggest that anyone who doubts that "virtual sex" is a kind of having sex view the excellent and hilarious film The Truth About Cats and Dogs . Look for the scene where Janeane Garofalo has a "conversation" with her new client. And watch it at home, preferably with someone you like to do philosophy with, if you see what I mean.

The surface grammar of the sentence “It’s hot in here” suggests that the sentence is about an objective state of the room. Let’s start there. There are two features of the assertion of this sentence that make you think it might not be about the temperature of the room: first, the assertion is based on a subjective experience of mine, and second, it uses the vague term “hot”. Let’s start with the first consideration. Notice that any claim anyone makes about contingent states of the external world is, if it’s a justified claim, going to be based on that person’s sensory experiences. If I say “You forgot to turn off the burner on the stove,” my claim will probably be based on seeing the flame, but my statement is a statement about the burner, not about my visual experience. Or if I say, “Something’s burning,” it’s probably because I smell the scorched butter, but it’s still the butter I’m talking about. (Guess what I did this morning making breakfast.) Contrast these cases with cases where I...

I am not sure you really have a philosophical question here. You worry that it might be morally wrong for you to continue to date a man with autism because he "may not fully understand his feelings or mine." I suspect that you are laboring under a misunderstanding of the nature of "autism." An autistic individual is not necessarily incapable of introspecting or articulating his (or her) own feelings; nor is an autistic person necessarily unable to understand the feelings of others. What appears to be the case, according to the experts I have read, is that autistic individuals lack certain ways of coming to understand the feelings of others that non-autistic people find natural. Autistic individuals typically have trouble "reading" facial expressions and body language, for example. Nonetheless, many autistic people contrive other ways of learning about the psychological states of other people, ways that are often effective enough that these other people don't realize that they're interacting...

You ask an excellent question. I think that your suspicion is correct; that an argument that shows merely that the universe had a designer does not show enough about the nature of the designer to warrant belief in any particular theological system. But I don’t think that many theologians would rely on the Argument from Design to justify the particulars of their respective religious systems. Most major religions derive the details from some body of authorized texts or testimony. It is, as you notice, a serious and quite open question what justifies the assumption that any of these authorized texts or testimonies embodies the word of the Creator – that is, that they accurately represent the mind of the Being whose existence is (let us concede) supported by the Argument from Design. Still, let’s see how far the Argument from Design could take us in learning the attributes of the Creator. In its strongest form, the Argument from Design is an “inference to best explanation.” It begins with...

In order to answer your question, I need to explain a distinction between two kinds of mental state: propositional attitude states, and qualitative states. A propositional attitude state is, as the name suggests, a state of having an attitude toward a proposition. Take the proposition expressed by the sentence, “there is milk in the fridge.” I can believe that proposition, that is, I can believe that there is milk in the fridge, but I can take other attitudes as well – I can hope that there’s milk in the fridge, want there to be milk in the fridge, regret that there’s milk in the fridge (because its availability caused you to eat the last brownie, perhaps), suppose for the sake of argument that there’s milk in the fridge, pretend that there’s milk in the fridge, etc. The point is that all these kinds of mental state crucially involve propositions or propositional content. A qualitative state is the state of simply experiencing – it’s a state where it “feels like” something to be in that...

The project of "improving" "the" language is one that has captured the imaginations of many people over time, but it seems to me to be a foolish one to undertake. Let me explain, by explaining my use of scare quotes. First: "the" language. There's no such thing. If you look at speakers of so-called "English," you'll find that they will differ in their vocabularies, in their grammars, and above all, in the emotional and aesthetic associations they attach to their words. What binds us together is merely the fact that we can to a significant degree understand each other's verbal behavior. But the engines of linguistic change are perpetual motion machines. Slang, idioms, metaphors, abbreviations, invented words -- they all pop in and out of existence, and they're all good. Amidst all this variety, talk of "the" English language is nothing more than abstract idealization -- useful for some scientific purposes, perhaps, but not to be thought of as literally true of human linguistic activity....

Human sexuality is complex and unpredictable. In particular, it's hard to know what effect the initiation of a sexual relationship is going to have on a person's emotional connections -- to the new sexual partner, or to others. Some people seem capable of having casual sexual relationships without forming any lasting romantic attachments, while other people seem incapable of forming a sexual relationship unless they have some antecedent emotional connection with the prospective partner. Some people feel that the physical intimacy inherent in sexual congress is necessarily self-revelatory and thus intimate in non-physical ways as well; others feel that the physical intimacy of sex need be no more personally "meaningful" than that inherent in a good massage. I don't see that any of these reactions or attitudes is more "ethical" than any other -- they are matters on which reasonable people are probably always going to differ. Given all that, I think it's up to individuals to reach agreement...