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Ethics
Feminism
Love

I married from back home because of certain cultural pressures. He seemed like an all around nice guy but when he got here he changed. He admitted that he had put on a show in order to convince me to bring him here and now he is trying to control me. He also always fights with me over money matters. At the moment we are separated but not divorced and I am contemplating whether or not I should divorce him. He does not leave me alone but constantly hurts me and thinks I am cheating on him. I also caught him trying to start affairs with women both abroad and local and I feel I cannot trust him. When he came here I liked him but now I feel little to nothing towards him and I think he wants to use me for some end (hence why he wants to get back). Also he frequently hints that it's good to use women for money and etc., and then dump them for other women... Although this may not be the right place to ask such a question but what do you philosophers think of the situation? I think it would be interesting...

Leave him. He's a creep. Let me explain. From your description of him, your husband seems to regard and treat you as a mere object for his own satisfaction, and his satisfaction consists largely in giving you pain. If this is accurate, then it seems to me that you are under no obligation to continue to tolerate his company.
Children
Ethics
Love
Sex

Was I morally correct in asking my (now) ex-wife to delay the divorce which she had initiated, in order to retain her much needed health insurance under my employer, until she had obtained such on her own? Or was she correct in her assertion that it would have been morally incorrect for her remain married to me, regardless of her health needs, due to the example shown to our children when she was meeting and dating others?

Under Federal Law (COBRA), companies with 20 or more employees arerequired to offer health care coverage at the group rate to formerspouses of employees for three years after a divorce. In somestates, companies with fewer employees are required to do the same. So,while it would be less expensive for your former wife to have been covered as a spouseunder your family plan, it’s probably just a mistake to believe thatyour former wife will not have health insurance coverage unless shedelays the divorce. Butsuch an observation doesn’t really touch the deep and complex issuesthat your and your former wife’s arguments raise about the nature andvalue of marriage. Let’s imagine that there were no such federallaw guaranteeing a three-year continuation of health insurance coveragefor former spouses. If you stayed married for the sake of providingyour wife health insurance coverage, wouldn’t you be doing somethingdishonest? Wouldn’t you be pretending, for the purpose of defrauding ahealth insurance company,...
Love

If someone leaves you, can they still love you; and if not, can you stop loving someone or would that mean you never loved them at all? Tyler

Indebted to T.H. Irwin ( Aristotle's First Principles ), I would put Aristotle’s point about friendship slightly differently —not that genuine friendship involves constancy, but that the best sort of friendship involves constancy. On Aristotle's view, friendship has atleast two features that lead to this result. Friends care about eachother for their own sake (1155b31-2, 1166a3-7), and friends wish tolive together (1157b19-24, 1166a7-9). I can’t care about another personfor her own sake if she has no stable character to be concerned with.And if her character is constantly changing, then we can make norational plans together about how we should live our lives togethersince I can’t share my life with another person if her ends aredifferent from my own or if we take pleasure and pain in differentthings (1157b22-4; 1165b23-7). But if I can’t make rational plans withmy friend, then my friendship will have limited value for me in my ownproject of self...
Emotion
Love

How to settle the emptiness when a relationship ends? Going out with friends won't help, reading and music don't help neither. What is this emptiness? Is it from me (something I can control) or is it from emotion (something people can't get control with)?

This might be a question that is best answered by professional psychologists rather than philosophers, but it does raise interesting questions about the nature of love. Several philosophers (e.g., Solomon, Scruton, Nozick) have suggested that when one person loves another, the lover’s sense of her own identity becomes merged with that of the beloved. The fact that a loss of a beloved evokes a feeling in the lover that is naturally described as “emptiness” seems to support this idea. Not only is the beloved no longer there; a part of the lover is no longer there. There is a hole in the identity of the lover, until the lover reconstructs her identity around other things that she loves or comes to love.
Love
Value

If no one ever loves me during my lifetime - if I don't ever have a relationship - will I have not lived properly? Is love that important to life, or is it something you can choose to engage in if you like? Thank you.

On Aristotle’s view, in order to determine whether Bob is living a goodlife, we first need to determine what kind of creature Bob is– e.g., ishe a human being, a dog, or an oak tree. We then would judge thequality of his life against a species standard of flourishing. Forexample, our view of what it would mean for a dog to live a good lifeis informed by our views about the nature of dogs. We tend to think ofa dog who lives its life in a cage as not living a good life for a dog,even if we imagine that it is given sufficient drugs to feel nodiscontent or frustration. A good life for a dog, we think, would beone thatinvolved companionship, running around, barking at threatening noisesand strangers, and so forth. Because a dog in a cage on drugs is notgiven the opportunity to engage in doggy activities, it is notfunctioning as a dog at a high level, and so, is not living a good lifefor a dog. If Bob is a dog, Aristotle would say, then we would judgehis quality of life as good just in case he had a lot of...
Love

What is the definition of love? Can you define love without listing characteristics of love?

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....
Love

Is it possible for one to be in love with the feeling of being in love, instead of loving the person you believe you're in love with?

The feeling of being in love is certainly lovable. And it seemspossible that one could love the feeling of love that one gets fromloving a particular person more than one loves that person.And it seems that one could believe that one loves a particular person,yet fail to really love that person, but because one believes that oneis in love with that person, one has the feeling of being in love withthat person. In such a situation, it seems, one could really love thefeeling of being in love with a particular person but not really love theperson. So, yes, I don’t see why not.