It's hard to believe that prostitution, as such, is wrong. There would seem to be cases in which this could be an unobjectionable voluntary exchange of services in which both parties are free to make the exchange. In such cases, it's not clear why engaging (or serving as) a prostitute would be any more objectionable than engaging (or serving as) a massage therapist. If so, there could be morally permissible cases of prostitution. But, of course, many cases are not like this. In many places in the world, many prostitutes are forced into sexual slavery, against their will, at a young age. Even where prostitutes were not forced by others into prostitution, many choose prostitution out of economic necessity, as someone might choose to sell a kidney out of economic necessity. Many who choose prostitution find themslves working for pimps that are abusive and don't allow easy exit from the profession. In conditions such as these, the sellers of sex may not be acting freely or, if freely, with a fair...

I think parenthood is a huge responsibility that is not always taken seriously enough, with the result that many people who are unable or unwilling to live up to the demands of good parenting have children and don't do well by them. We require education and licensure to drive a car yet leave unregulated the far more complex and arguably more consequential task of parenting. I am not defending state regulation of parenting (though I think it is a topic worth serious discussion), but I am claiming that parenting is morally serious business and that adults don't have a right to reproduce without being willing and able to be good parents or provide good parents. But you're not worried about cases involving bad parents. You seem to think that having children is always in principle "reprehensible," because despite the best efforts of good parents, children suffer, both as children and, later, as adults. Your position curiously seems to look at only one side of life's ledger, viz. the pain and other harms...

Insofar as a system is chaotic, it is impossible to predict all the consequences of actions we perform. Many systems, while not literally chaotic, are still complex, with the result that predictions about the total consequences of one's actions are difficult and not fully reliable. But it's not clear that these facts about complexity and chaos compromise the claims of classical utilitarians, such as Mill. The classical utilitarians (e.g. Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick) all insisted that utilitarianism -- the demand that we act so as to promote human happiness -- be understood as a standard of duty or right action, rather than as a decision procedure . That is, what determines the moral assessment of one action in relation to others is the comparative value of its actual consequences and not the comparative value of its expected consequences. Whether we should try to apply the utilitarian principle in various contexts is itself a practical question, the answer to which depends upon the comparative...

A moral code that allowed you to do anything that did not involve causing harm maliciously would be by many people's lights too permissive. (a) First of all, we probably wouldn't want to confine our attention to harmful actions performed from malice. There are many cases where an agent seems to act wrongly by causing harm, even if he did not act with malice. For instance, typically if I cause you harm negligently, I wrong you in a way that is prohibited by morality and law, even if I did not harm you out of malice. (b) But behavior needn't be harmful to be wrong and even regulable. (i) For instance, most people think that unsuccessful criminal attempts (e.g. attempted but unsuccessful murders or assaults) are wrong and punishable, even if no one is in fact harmed. (ii) Many kinds of infidelity (e.g. adultery, promise-breaking, etc) seem wrong, even if no one discovers the infidelity or is harmed by the undetected infidelity. We may not want the law intruding to correct these wrongs, but that doesn...

It's a common claim in morality and in the law that one can't be held responsible for wrongdoing unless one was able to know that the conduct in question was wrong and was able to regulate one's actions in accordance with this knowledge. This makes a certain kind of normative competence a condition of responsibility. So the question becomes whether not having been taught right from wrong precludes the requisite kind of normative competence. That depends on both the nature of one's upbringing and the sort of moral knowledge required. I doubt one could demonstrate moral incompetence simply because one had not been explicitly taught not to violate the rule one broke. Presumably, one should be able to infer some moral rules (e.g. don't cheat investors) from other ones (e.g. don't cheat). And parents aren't the only source of moral education; friends, teachers, employers, public figures, and the law are also important sources of moral instruction. So the fact that Mom and Dad didn't teach Junior the...

A couple of points. First, your worry about the irrelevance or unimportance of philosophy applies differently to different areas of philosophy. There are many kinds of philosophical issues. Many ethical issues -- for instance, the sort of issues about poverty, inequality, war, and individual responsibility to which you allude -- are or raise philosophical issues. Of course, redressing poverty and inequality or preventing or protesting war are different from thinking about conceptual issues at stake in these issues or debates about them. Nonetheless clear thinking about these issues can be relevant to redressing them successfully. So at least parts of philosophy address the sorts of moral and political issues you care about. So, second, we might turn to those parts of philosophy that concern more recondite issues about metaphysics and epistemology (broadly understood) that seem to have a less direct bearing on the sorts of moral and political issues that concern you. Of course, thinking about...

There are of course the usual things anyone ought to consider before applying to graduate school in philosophy -- you need to love philosophy and you need to understand that good jobs (at research universities or top liberal arts programs) are scarce and require that you go to a very strong graduate program and do first-rate work. These and other qualifications and advice are discussed at Brian Leiter's Philosophical Gourmet Report (http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com). But I don't think that being a somewhat older student, of the sort you describe, by itself puts you at any significant disadvantage in getting into a good graduate program or getting a good job. I don't have statistics on thes issues, but I have certainly encountered very talented applicants to graduate school or for tenure-track jobs that took some time out somewhere between high school and graduate school. Someone who took time off between college and graduate school might be at a disadvantage in applying to graduate school, because...

It probably depends on what you have in mind as "teaching religion". You might have in mind teaching comparative religions or the study of a particular religion as a cultural and/or historical phenomenon. If so, then I don't see why teaching religion, in this sense, is or need be wrong, at least if it is offered as an elective, rather than a requirement. However, you might mean teaching religion as involving representing theistic claims as true and/or advocating some religious doctrines, rather than others. It seems to me that this is probably wrong in multiple ways. First, it is legally wrong because it violates the anti-establishment clause of the First Amendment, requiring a separation of church and state. But there seem to be good moral reasons for this constitutional guarantee, so it seems likely to be morally wrong as well. Whether to believe religious claims at all and, if so, which ones seem to be matters of conscience and are subject to persistent, intractable debate that is...

The answer to your question depends on the concept of happiness. Two common assumptions about happiness are (a) that happiness is a good -- according to hedonism, the only good -- and (b) that happiness is subjective. But these two assumptions are in tension. Consider (b). Some people treat happiness as an essentially subjective condition, akin to contentment. If we accept such a view, several other claims seem to follow. It looks like happiness is a matter of being in a certain subjective state and doesn't depend upon how this state is caused -- its sources or etiology. Its likely that this sort of contentment is dependent on brain chemistry, as any mental state presumably is. For any given individual there may be multiple brain states and processes that would produce contentment, and which brain states and processes produce pleasure may vary among individuals or across species. It also seems like contenment is something the subject ought to be authoritatiave about. If so, one can't be...

I may not be best positioned to address this question, since my own work in ethical theory is mostly not deeply informed by broader social-biological perspectives on animal behavior, but I'll have a try. The question seems to assume (a) that ethicists are not influenced by social-biological perspectives on animal behavior and (b) that they should be. But both assumptions may be open to question. Here, much may depend on what the questioner has in mind by social-biological perspectives and the way in which they might inform ethics. If this is a catch-all for any good work done in the natural and social sciences, then (a) might be doubted. At least, it would be overstated. While some ethicists pursue primarily internal questions about ethics conceived of as articulating principles that both subsume and explain common moral judgments and also provide reflectively acceptable guidance and criticism, others do work that is interdisciplinary in some way or other. For instance, there has been recent work...