The question of whether an artist has any moral responsibility whatsoever with regard to the content or the impact of her work is fascinating, and there are many historical examples relevant to it. (One case that leaps immediately to my mind is that of Leni Riefenstahl, treated at length by Susan Sontag in an amazing essay, "Fascinating Fascism," which I highly recommend.) Proponents of the autonomy of art--'art for art's sake'--might deny that the artist has any obligation whatsoever to anyone or anything besides her work. (The case of Gauguin, treated by the philosopher Bernard Williams in a his essay, "Moral Luck," is an instance of an artist who abjured any responsibility to anything besides his work.) On such a view, the artist should seek only to create the best art that she can, and damn the consequences of creating art with a particular content. Such a position might be buttressed by an extreme 'formalist' conception of art, according to which art consists only in the exploitation of the...

Your question goes to the heart of the basis for moral judgments and their justification. If moral judgments are supposed to reflect universal standards that are binding on all possible rational beings--Kant, for example, seems to conceive of ethics this way--then it would not be possible for a rational species to evolve that would not share the same moral judgments as all other rational species. If, however, one thinks that moral judgments reflect certain norms that are internal to a culture, and/or that reflect the ways in which members of that culture negotiate their relations with one another, then moral judgments might well vary with the nature of the species in question. (One can, for example, imagine a culture in which it was morally wrong ever to manifest any signs of pain or distress, for example.) The deep question here, it seems to me, is whether morality should be seen as applying to all beings of certain types, or whether it should instead be seen as a very particular, species-specific or...

You raise an interesting nest of issues here, regarding the use of technology to assist in the production of art. The starting point for the question is the judgment that (recordings of) songs that employ technology to correct the pitch in a singer's voice are of lesser quality than those that do not, and the similar judgment about visual artists who use technology to create images. Although I'm not aware of having encountered instances of visual art produced by graphics programs, and am far more familiar with music that has been modified by technology, if not by the use of Auto-Tune in particular, since it seems to me that most recorded music--unless it is the recording of a live performance--has been technologically enhanced in some way, I believe nevertheless that one can address the general issue without delving into the particulars of the technology. Perhaps one reason that it may be claimed that works created or enhanced through technology are not as good as those that have not been enhanced or...

While Oliver Leaman's aesthetic justification of efforts to preserve endangered species is certainly one consideration that might be advanced in support of such efforts--as well as efforts to preserve plants and other living organisms, such as coral reefs and rainforests (conceiving of the forest as a whole, an ecosystem, as an organism), and even inanimate natural features of the environment, such as icebergs--it's not clear to me that it's the most satisfactory or compelling consideration. Absent some justification for a principle of plenitude--of maximizing the variety of beings in the world--there is no reason to accept such a justification of efforts to preserve anything. It seems to me, however, that other considerations might be advanced in support of conservation. First, it might be argued that given the interrelationship of species, the elimination of any species, especially a predator like the wolf, which plays an important role in keeping the population of other species in check,...

Your question seems to raise two distinct kinds of issues: first, and most generally, what, if anything, is wrong about altering a work of art; second, in what respect can different kinds of works of art--such as novels or lithographs, of which there are multiple instances or exemplars--or pieces of music or plays, that are meant to be interpreted in particular ways, be altered. You remark that what's wrong about altering a work--say, drawing a moustache on the original Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre (as opposed to drawing a moustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, as Duchamp did), or defacing Picasso's Guernica, as I believe happened when it was hanging in the Museum of Modern Art--is that "doing so wrongs the artist or is otherwise offensive." It's not clear to me that this is indeed the case. Suppose Duchamp had indeed drawn a moustache on the original Mona Lisa. Would Duchamp thereby have wronged Leonardo da Vinici? Perhaps, but only if it's possible to wrong someone who is dead. ...

On the basis of your remarks, it seems that you aren't especially interested in 'theoretical' philosophy (roughly, metaphysics and epistemology), but that you are interested in 'practical' philosophy (ethics) and aesthetics. You might want further to investigate just what kinds of work are being done by professional philosophers who focus on ethics--including 'applied ethics', such as bioethics and business ethics--and aesthetics, in order to get a better sense of what sorts of issues are currently 'live' in professional philosophy. Depending on the nature of your interest in "public perceptions of philosophy and debates about science, and in general about different attitudes and values in society," you may be able to explore the questions that interest you in a philosophy department; the more empirical your interests, however--that is, the more you are interested in determining just what those interests are, as opposed to assessing the basis for those interests--the less likely that a philosophy...

This is a wonderful question, which goes to the heart of just what ethics is about. Some philosophers--such as Immannuel Kant--have maintained that ethics consists in universal principles of practical reason, which must therefore apply to all rational beings, including God, angels, devils, and any other rational being whatsoever. This 'universalist' conception of ethics obviously abstracts away from any other differences among beings to identify rationality and the capacity to be bound by ethical obligations. If, however, one thinks that ethics is about how agents negotiate their relations with one another, how they, as it were, 'get along', then it would seem that the sorts of differences that you point out would be relevant to shaping the ethical relations of these beings, and consequently, differences in biology, etc., might well lead to different ethical concerns. So what is ethics about? Is it about duties that apply to all rational beings? Or is it about how beings negotiate their...

Your question goes to the heart of debates about personal identity, and even goes back to the early modern starting point for those debates, the chapter on personal identity in John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding . Much discussion about personal identity has turned on the question of whether personal identity is to be located in psychological continuity or in bodily continuity of some sort; if one is inclined to think that the identity of a person is to be identified with the identity of her brain, then personal identity does indeed seem to consist in bodily continuity. Your question goes even further, for you wonder whether the brain is to be identified as the locus of personhood, so that a person just is her brain. One thing that this view has going for it is that it seems that all human persons have had--it's not clear whether we can know, without doing brain scans, that all human persons have brains--brains. So having a brain would seem to be necessary for being a...

Thought experiments have a long and distinguished history both in philosophy and in other disciplines (Einstein, for example, used thought experiments in certain of his papers). Thought experiments have featured especially prominently in treatments of personal identity since John Locke's discussion of the topic in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding , published in the seventeenth-century, to more recent treatments of the topic by Bernard Williams and Derek Parfit. The question of the status and significance of such thought experiments has also received considerable discussion, reflecting the fact that the very nature of philosophy is itself a topic of philosophical interest. The philosopher Kathleen Wilkes has even written a book that attempts to treat personal identity without resorting to thought experiments of the sort found in many discussions of the topic, Personal Identity Without Thought Experiments . One worry about the appeal to thought experiments in discussions of personal...

It's not clear to me that when Ebert said that there are no video games that compare with great works of art in other media, he meant to imply that works in different media are comparable, as if there were some metric by which one could directly compare instances of different types of art. Ebert's point seems to be that although in media such as literature, music, film, etc., there are certain works that are recognized by all suitably placed judges as great--although of course the relative greatness of the works in any given art is a matter of considerable dispute--there are no video games that could be seen as great in the same way as works of music, film, literature, etc., are great. This may reflect a judgment on Ebert's part that video games are not a medium that can support work that could even conceivably qualify as great in the way that works of music, film, literature, etc., can; it may also reflect Ebert's judgment that no video game that has been created to date counts as a great piece...