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...

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...

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...

Virtue theorists of various stripes have the resources to deny that a terrorist need be displaying virtues, such as courage, if they are doing something unjust. Classical virtue theorists (including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, among others) thought the virtues had to be admirable and praiseworthy. So they reasoned that traditional assumptions about the virtues and their the extension were mistaken. Standing firm in battle is not courageous if one's cause is not just. Indeed, on some classical views, the virtuous action must always be morally best. This assumption tends to make some version of the unity of the virtues -- according to which the virtues are inseparable and one -- attractive. But then if the terrorist's act is unjust it cannot be brave, because this would violate the unity of the virtues. Many modern conceptions of the virtues would also have the resources to condemn terrorism. Julia Driver is a consequentialist about virtue who sees virtues as dispositions with largely...

I'm not sure why you think that Plato would deny that there are objective and universal moral values. To the contrary, Plato is often taken to be a prototypical advocate of the sort of realism or objectivity about moral value that posits moral truths that obtain independently of the appraiser's beliefs or attitudes about what is right or wrong (cf. John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong , ch. 1). This would be the common reading of Plato, with which I would agree. In the Euthydemus and Theaetetus Plato offers extended arguments against relativistic views, and the in Euthyphro he extends his realism to virtues, such as piety. You'd certainly be swimming against the scholarly current to read Plato as an advocate of any significant kind of relativism.

We can take one of two different attitudes toward the sanctity of life. We could try to promote this value or we could honor it on each and every occasion. Promoting value reflects a consequentialist approach to morality, whereas honoring values treats them as side constraints on the pursuit of goals. Sometimes promoting and honoring values seem to provide different guidance. In the lifeboat case, promoting human life would seem to require sacrificing one to save several, whereas honoring human life would seem to require that no one be sacrificed against her will, even if this means that fewer lives would be saved or even no lives saved. Sacrifice to promote human life will be less objectionable if the determination of who is to be sacrificed is made in some fair (e.g. random) way. It may not be objectionable at all (it may not even violate side constraints) if someone consents to be sacrificed, and her consent is informed and uncoerced. It's often permissible to impose a burden on someone...

I see nothing wrong with your using your girlfriend's love for you to get her to seek medically and/or psychologically necessary help with her eating disorder. It might be wrong to use another's love to achieve some purely personal or private benefit for yourself that your lover did not and could not approve or share. Healthy love involves mutual concern for the other for the other's own sake. This concern for the other's own sake requires concern for her true good, and this may require working to change or reform some aspect of the beloved or her situation, even if this involves some resistance. This would certainly be true if your girlfirend's problem was once of substance abuse. It's not clear to me how an eating disorder is relevantly different. However, one caution is that concern for the beloved's own sake does seem to speak against being manipulative in the way you use her love for you to get her into treatment. Moreover, your goal should be to use her love for you simply as a stepping...