I have a slightly different reaction to your question that Prof. Fosl does. The version of feminism that I subscribe to says that sexism consists in the existence of gender roles -- that is, in the social construction of categories of persons founded on differences in reproductive physiology or morphology. I envision a world in which (as Richard Wasserstrom puts it) there is no social significance assigned to biological sex. Gender categories, because they cover so many facets of life -- intellectual interests, modes of dress, choice of career, aesthetic preferences -- serve to regiment human difference. So if you know that someone likes big trucks and is the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you can predict that that person's favorite movie is not Steel Magnolias . In a world without gender, human differences would be much less systematic -- people would thus be more different from each other than they currently are. Thus I think that the question you pose involves a false dilemma. ...

There are two facts about sex that have made its regulation a matter of importance to human beings: first, that it is an extremely powerful motivator. People typically want to have it a lot -- and I mean both that they want it a lot, and that they want a lot of it. Because sexual desire is so powerful, it can override lots of other desires, as well as lots of considerations that ought to count against giving in to the desire in the first place. The second fact is that the consequences of having sex can be weighty. There is not only the fact that pregnancy can occur, although the conception of another human being is certainly a matter of paramount importance to human society. There is also the fact that sexual behavior can generate or sustain powerful emotional responses. When all goes well, sex can bolster meaningful and sustaining connections between people, but when things go wrong, disasters can result. Unreciprocated love causes terrible unhappiness, and jealousy can lead to violence. ...

I suspect that when people think it’s immoral for someone to enjoy a violent video game, they are presuming that they know the answer to what is in fact an empirical question: do the attitudes and appetites that the gamer is indulging during play “carry over” to real life? Does the “bloodlust” of the gamer predicts or cause real bloodlust. Will playing such games render the gamer less sensitive to real violence? My experience suggests that the gamer’s attitudes do not carry over to real life. I like to play violent video games, but I can only remember one instance in my whole life in which I actually hit someone (my son – and I sorely regret it), and I still find I’m revolted by photos or descriptions of scenes of torture and war. I’m not the only one like this – if I were, then either violent movies would be a lot less popular, or there’d be a lot more murderous rampaging going on than there is. I suspect that it’s really important to the games’ and movies’ being fun that the players and the...

I think yours is an excellent -- but too infrequently asked -- question. It's not at all obvious, once you start to think about it, what is supposed to give God the right to legislate for anyone, much less for everyone. Would it be because He is as powerful as it is possible to be? Well, might is not supposed to make right – just because someone can beat you up doesn’t mean he has the right to do so. How about the fact that He created us? Well, human parents create children – that is, they take deliberate steps to bring it about that a child comes into existence – all the time. Do they have the right to make rules for their children? Yes and no. Yes, while the children are young, vulnerable, and dependent on their parents for their material existence. (And even here there are limits – the government ought to step in and terminate parental authority if the parents are negligent or abusive.) But no, once the children are mature – we do not (at least not in my society, not at this point in time...

I completely agree with you: it does seem plausible that noninclusive language fosters or reflects sexist thought and behavior, but it is in fact an empirical issue. This is, as it happens, a hot topic among psycholinguists at the moment. The research of Stanford psychologist Lera Boroditsky (view some of the work here: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/ ) suggests that how we talk does affect how we think, and in particular, that the gender coding of nouns affects the properties we attribute to their referents. University of Pennsylvania psychologist Lila Gleitman has evidence, however, that how we talk has virtually no effect on how we think. I couldn't find a link to relevant work of hers, but here's her homepage: http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~gleitman/ There's probably a lot of relevant work in social psychology, among scholars who study the development of stereotypes and so forth, but I don't know that literature. Colleagues? Benjamin Whorf took the idea that talk...

I have a few things to say in response to your question. First of all, about whether too high a value is placed onrationality in “Western” culture: I feel that rationality is too little valuedin the United States at the moment, and that irrationality is celebrated. An extremely popular trope in US books,movies, and television shows is the heroism of a person who “believes” – that is, who accepts on faith something thatflies in the face of all evidence and logic. The skeptic, the “man (usually) of science,” is always shown to bewrong, often disastrously so. And manypeople report with great pride that they hold their particular religious orpolitical beliefs on the basis of no evidence or reason at all. “It’s just what I believe.” Secondly, as to the nature of our cognitive processes. You’re raising a perfectly sensible empiricalquestion – what are the neurological processes that account for the phenomenawe call “thought”? It’s clear...

I think you've pretty much answered your own question. You see (get it?) that light could exist even in the absence of any creatures sensitive to it. And of course in such a situation, there would be no one and nothing experiencing the light. So is anything visible ? "Visible," like many English words that end in "ible," "able," "uble," or "ile," picks out what philosophers call a "disposition" -- a condition of being ready, so to speak, to cause certain things to happen, or to undergo certain changes, if certain conditions are met. Salt is sol uble -- that means that if it's put into a pot of water, then it will dissolve. Waterford crystal is frag ile -- if you drop it, it will break. Similarly, to call an object vis ible is to say that if it is illuminated, and if a creature that is sensitive to light points its sensitive parts toward the object, then the object will cause the creature to have visual experiences (by bouncing the light onto the creature's...

I have to add a bit to Richard Heck's explanation of the "problem of evil. " There are actually two different problems that go by this name. One is the "logical" problem of evil: here the challenge to the believer is to show how the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly benevolent being is consistent with the existence of suffering in our world. I think this challenge can be met rather easily. all that must be done is to deny that suffering is a bad thing. This can be done in a number of ways: one can argue, for example, that we only regard suffering as bad because we fail to understand God's larger purpose in allowing suffering -- really, it's quite good, because it leads to greater wisdom than we'd obtain otherwise, or something. Or it can be argued that "suffering" is only a relative notion, and that if there is any variation at all in the amount of pleasure we experience, we will always regard the least amount as "suffering." I don't think either of these illustrative...

Paul Bloom, a developmental psychologist at Yale, has evidence that human beings are "natural dualists," who believe that minds are distinct from, and can exist separately from, their bodies. He's just published a book about his findings, called Descartes' Baby . In addition to the scientific data he adduces, he points out that human beings universally tell stories about life after physical death, reincarnation, possession, and transmogrification (like Kafka's "Metamorphosis"). I'm not convinced by his research that we are dualists -- I think it's consistent with his data to conclude that we are functionalists -- that is, that we believe that psychology is an abstract feature of bodies. For one thing, most of these folk tales are equivocal about the physicality of the person: so even if it's stipulated that someone survives the death of their body, stories usually go on to attribute physical attributes to the "soul" -- souls are said to be located in particular places, they are...

I agree with the thrust of your comments -- that there should be uniform physical requirements for anyone who wishes to serve in the military, and these requirements should be based on the physical demands of the jobs recruits will be required to do. But it's this second proposition that should engage our attention. What are the physical demands of a military career? Modern warfare is highly mechanized; that means both that a great many combat roles will not require much in the way of brute physical strength, and that many will require specialized knowledge and mental skills. There are, in short, no uniform physical requirements for serving in "today's army." So it may well be that the relaxed physical standards for women result in no loss of combat readiness whatsoever. In that case, the relaxed standards ought to be the norm for everyone, with more demanding standards imposed only for those who wish to serve in the more physically demanding roles. My guess is that the sexism involved...