I know that you’re primarily interested in the more sophisticatedquestion concerning the extent of our obligations to friends, but I’mstuck on childhood “snitching,” or as it’s known in my family,“tattling.” “Don’t be a tattle-tale,” I’m often tempted to tell my fiveyear old when she tells me of some minor indiscretion of her fourteenyear old sister. Why not? Didn’t her sister do something wrong? Andshouldn’t wrong-doers be held to account? And isn’t it my job as aparent to enforce all morally legitimate norms? No, it’s my jobas a parent to do what is in my power to protect my children fromunjustified harm and to help them to develop their capacities to livegood, worthwhile, and morally decent lives. If they are being wrongedby someone else and if they do not yet have the skills or authority toprevent that wrong, then I must intervene. But the usual situationsthat motivate tattling aren’t like that. Most tattling is motivated byenvy. Tattlers tend to regard moral norms as arbitrary...

I wonder what you believe is the relevance of the fact that you are an atheist. Perhapsyou believe that in the absence of God, nothing really counts as goodor evil, and so, for you, the only practical question that suchpractices as torture raise is whether you (or those close to you) arelikely to suffer from them. If so, then I’d suggest that you consider the following posting on the relationship between religion and morality: 27 .

If you regard guilty feelings as a form of self-punishment, then it is reasonable to ask whetherthere isa less painful way to achieve the same positive effects. But I agreewith Hilary Bok that feelings of guilt are not self-inflictedpunishment. She writes: “If we care about living by our standards andabout the state of our wills, then we will find the thought that wehave failed to act as we think we should painful. In so doing we arenot giving free rein to self-hatred or turning internalized aggressionon ourselves, but responding in the only appropriate way to a factabout our conduct. For just as our claim to love another person iscalled into question if the demise of our relationship to that personleaves us unmoved, not minding the fact that we have willingly violatedour standards calls into question our claim that they are, in fact,standards we think we should live by. . . . We can avoid the pain ofguilt in only two ways: first, by living blameless lives, and second,by ceasing to care about the world we...

While it is true that, given the current state of technology, each of us will eventually die, it is not true that, no matter what, each of us will have a life of a particular length. A longer life is often more valuable than a shorter life because it often contains more good things than a shorter life. With a longer life, I have the opportunity to develop my talents, to engage in long term, complex and valuable projects, to build and cultivate complex and valuable relationships, and to have more fun. Murder is a bad thing, it seems to me, simply because it cuts short a life that otherwise would have been much longer and more valuable both for the person who lived it and for others who are positively affected by her life. From the point of view of the person who dies prematurely and of those who are affected by her life, it doesn’t make much difference whether her life is ended by a murderer, accident, or disease. It’s the same loss in any case. Unfortunately, though, accidents and diseases...

What else could justify the means other than the end? Thequestion, though, is what end we should have in view. In the case thatyou imagine, it seems that the relevant end is getting a guiltycriminal in jail. Let’s assume for the sake of this discussion that wehave no reason to doubt that such an end would be a good thing. Let’sassume that the person is truly guilty of a violent and unprovokedcrime and that he’s very likely to continue his life of violence ifleft unchecked. We then weigh the good end of preventing furtherviolence against the bad means of lying and it looks like, on balance,the goodness of the end outweighs the badness of the means. Not only,it seems, are we permitted to lie; in fact, we’re morally obligated todo so. The problem with this line of reasoning is that itdoesn’t take into account all of the relevant ends. In this context,when we are considering the ends, we must also consider the ends of theentire criminal justice system– namely, to protect the interests of all ...

This question is extremely difficult to answer, because to answer itsatisfactorily, we must first settle the question of the nature ofmorality. Morality proposes certain norms for our behavior and perhapsalso for our emotional responses to certain events. But unless weknow what these norms are for ,we can’t know whether or whywe should care about such norms. And unless we know what such norms arefor, we can’t know whether any proposed moral norm, such as “treatevery creature’s pleasure and pain as if it has equal importance,” iscorrect. If we thought, for example, that moral norms served thefunction of governing our behavior according to the will of God, thenwe would attempt to determine the correct moral norms by attempting toget information about the will of God. If, to consider anotherpossibility, we thought that moral norms served the function ofconstraining human behavior so as to allow for the sociallycooperative behavior that is essential to human flourishing, then wewould look to other sorts of...

The fact that we usually feel pleasure after we are aware of having performed an act that we believe to be good does not imply that we performed the good act for the sake of the pleasure we expected to feel when we succeeded. True: we do many things simply for the sake of the pleasure that they allow us to feel. Many people, much of the time, have sex simply because they enjoy doing so, and if they didn’t enjoy sex, they wouldn’t, and perhaps couldn’t, have sex. But not all actions are like that. Some of the things that we do we do simply because we think that they’re worthwhile things to do. Since we believe that they’re worthwhile, we will feel satisfaction upon learning that we did something worthwhile. However, it doesn’t follow from the fact that we often experience pleasure when we act successfully that we are always motivated by considerations of self-interest. For many such acts, it can’t be the case that we perform them for the sake of the pleasure that our success causes, since our...

The details of specific cases matter, but a general rule of thumb that many ethicists would endorse is that one may restrict another (adult) person’s freedom only if a significant harm will thereby be prevented. Further, one should use the least restrictive option compatible with preventing this harm.

It seems to me that the answer to this question depends on the answerto at least four other questions: (1) Under what conditions does onecount as living a life that is worth living? (2) Would a given medicalintervention allow me to continue to live a life that is worth living?(3) What obligations do I have to others (and in particular, does mycontinuing to live allow me to meet certain obligations to others, ordoes my continuing to live put morally unacceptable burdens on others)?and (4) Would a given medical intervention allow me to meet my moralobligations? Of course, the answers to these questions, and the weight that one should give to the answers to these questions, are verydifficult to determine.

If you look around the world or study human history, it is easy to beimpressed by the apparent diversity of opinion about what sort ofactions are morally permissible or impermissible. Moreover, it might seemthat certain moral disagreements– e.g., concerning the morality ofearly-term abortion– are not rationally resolvable. And thisobservation can easily lead one to the conclusion that morality issimply a matter of opinion. However, it seems to me that theevidence for a significant degree of rationally irresolvable moraldisagreement is not as great as it seems at first sight. Let’s take forexample the moral principle that one should never cause another persona significant harm just for the fun of it. I have never heard of any society or culture in which thismoral principle is not accepted. Ofcourse, in differentsocieties there will be disagreement about the circumstances in whichit is permissible to cause harm to another individual, but I think thatin many cases thebasis of this disagreement is not...