I’ll leave it to others to say what a belief in the existence of God can promise besides belief in one’s own immortality. Yesterday morning, in the “This I Believe” series on NPR, the magician/comedian Penn Jillette reminded me of some of the things that belief in the non-existence of God promises. You can listen to him here .

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...

Just to set the record straight. Some such claim is often attributed to Socrates on the basis of his remarks in Plato’s Apology (21a-e), but the claim that he actually makes is much less paradoxical. Socrates reports that his friend Chaerephon went to the oracle at Delphi to ask if any person was wiser than Socrates. The oracle apparently answered, no. After having cross-examined lots of people who had a reputation for wisdom and having discovered as a result that their reputation was undeserved, Socrates drew the following conclusion about the significance of the oracle’s answer: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know when I do not know” ( Ap . 21d-e).

Peter is right. Many have taken the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues to be a skeptic at least with regard to knowledge of the most worthwhile things. My own view is that, at least as he’s represented in the Platonic dialogues, Socrates is not a skeptic. He did not believe that it was impossible to acquire such knowledge. In fact, he devotes his life to acquiring such knowledge. He simply believed that it was very difficult to acquire such knowledge and that no one that he had yet met had done so. How, then, might he respond to Alex’s worries that his position is paradoxical? He would first have to explain that he could be wiser than someone else without being in a cognitive state that would qualify as knowledge. He would then have to explain that when he speaks of knowledge of worthwhile things, he primarily has in mind knowledge of what things are most worthwhile, that is, what things are the most worthy goals to which we should devote our lives ( Ap . 29d-30b). On Socrates’ view,...

For an answer to a similar question, go here .

One way of thinking of a perfect world is as a world that cannot be improved upon in any way. There are no problems to be solved, because everything is as it should be. But paradoxically, perhaps, such a perfect world would not be perfect for us. We’ve evolved to be the ultimate problem solvers, and we take a great deal of satisfaction in our successful problem solving. If there were no longer any problems to be solved, there would no longer be anything left for us to do. And how perfect can life be if there’s no point to doing anything? Having said that, I think that I would opt for a world in which there was always enough food, no war, and eminently trustworthy people. Such improvements seem only to eliminate a lot of pointless suffering, and there would still be plenty of interesting problems remaining to be solved. Whether the elimination of death would be a genuine improvement is unclear to me. Bernard Williams has argued (“The Makropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality...

Bernard Gert’s account of love is very elegant in its simplicity, but Iwonder whether it is adequate as an account of the necessary andsufficient conditions for love. I often get pleasure from others’pleasure. When I see children enjoying themselves on the playground,when I see dogs wagging their tails so hard that their entire lowerbody wags, I can’t help but feel pleasure, even when I don’t know thesechildren or these dogs, much less love them. Perhaps this isn’t thekind of getting pleasure from another’s pleasure that Bernard has inmind. Perhaps I’m not really taking pleasure in their pleasure: I’m just feeling pleasure as a result of seeing theirpleasure as a result of my extraordinary powers of empathy. Perhapsthen the relevant sense of “getting pleasure from another’s pleasure”involves valuing that other person’s pleasure for its own sake. On thisunderstanding, if X values Y’s pleasure for its own sake and as aresult takes pleasure in the simple fact that Y experienced pleasure,then one loves Y....

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.

Aristotle argued that it is irrational to want prestige or honor for its own sake. Why? In the Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Aristotle asks you to imagine yourself honored by people forwhom you have no respect and who honor you for attributes that you donot believe are particularly worthwhile (perhaps your fingerprintpattern (my example, not Aristotle's)). Would you value their honor? No, he predicts, you would disdain it. It would beworthless, unless perhaps your prestige in their minds gave you powerto do something that you thought was worthwhile. What, then, about poweritself? Is that valuable for its own sake? Well, let’s imagine havingimmense power. In particular, let’s imagine that you can make anybodydo anything you want her to do. But let’s imagine also that you can’tthink of anything worthwhile that you want her to do. Is your power ofany value to you in these circumstances? Again, the answer seems to be,no. Power is valuable only to the extent that it can be used to gainsomething else of...