This is a very interesting question--sociopaths and psychopaths have long figured in the literature on free will, but relatively little sustained attention has been devoted to the question of whether they are morally responsible for what they do until quite recently. One psychopath who has been treated at length is Robert Alton Harris, who figures prominently in Gary Watson's paper, "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme": although the paper treats Harris's case at length, its chief aim is not to to determine whether Harris is morally responsible but instead to examine the relation between reactive attitudes and judgments of freedom and responsibility, and thereby to illuminate P. F. Strawson's fascinating and amazing article, "Freedom and Resentment." Recent sustained engagements with the question of whether psychopaths can be morally responsible include P. S. Greenspan, "Responsible Psychopaths," Philosophical Psychology , 16/3, 2003; Paul Litton, "Responsibility...

I wanted to make some remarks on the principle of charity that go in a different direction from Eddy's answer to the question. The principle of charity admits of different interpretations: it can be understood--as Eddy seems to understand it--as enjoining one to make as much sense as possible of the words of another, and to give those words the strongest possible interpretation; it can also be understood--as Davidson, for one, seems to understand it--as a principle of rational accommodation, according to which the words of another are understood so as to maximize agreement. One problem with both formulations of the principle of charity, which is especially manifest in the second formulation, is that adherence to the principle of charity may lead one to attribute a meaning to the words of another that yields propositions that fail to capture the propositions that one's interlocutor was trying to express. Adherence to the principle of charity when doing work in the history of philosophy, for example,...

Although there may at least initially appear to be something inconsistent in being happy with one's life at one time and being sad about one's life at another time even though nothing has changed with respect to one's life, provided that one is not happy and sad about one's life in the same respect , there is no paradox--neither a logical paradox nor a paradox of rationality--in such a case. For it is plausible that there could be aspects of one's life about which one had reason to be happy and other aspects of one's life about which one had reason to be sad, and so, depending on which aspects of one's life one focused, one could be happy with one's life at one time and then sad about one's life at a different time, even though nothing had changed in one's life between the times in question. While there is no logical contradiction here, however, such a situation could suggest that one hasn't fully integrated one's attitudes towards the various aspects of one's life. I am inclined to think that...

I wanted to add a few thoughts prompted by Amy's very interesting response. First, if you're generally interested in the topic of the meaning of life, you might check out Albert Camus's retelling of the story of Sisyphus, which concludes: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." This might lead one to think that Camus has fallen into the kind of objection advanced by Taylor, but it's not clear to me that he has. In any event, Camus's essay is tricky and complicated, but it is also well-written, rich, and rewarding, I think it well worth the time and effort. Second, if you are interested in the way that a living philosopher grapples with this sort of question, I heartily recommend Susan Wolf's book, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters , which engages in an extended way unparalleled by the work of other recent philosophers that I know with this general topic. Wolf, if I remember correctly--and I may well be misremembering--suggests a similar response to the question of what gives life meaning to that...

If one means by 'emotional infidelity' feeling attracted to another person than the one to whom is committed, or to feeling enmity or having bad thoughts towards someone towards to whom one is committed in friendship, than the phenomenon seems very possible indeed. Consider the following case, which I think is not idiosyncratic: something bad happens to a friend, and instead of sympathizing with that person--at least in one's thoughts--one takes pleasure in that friend's misfortune. (In German, this is called ' Schadenfreude '.) In taking pleasure in the misfortune of a friend, one is being emotionally unfaithful to that friendship--which, I think, in principle requires in principle that one sympathize and commiserate with the misfortunes of one's friend. The deep question, however, is why, if cases such as these are indeed correctly characterized as cases of emotional infidelity, why such emotional infidelity is as common as I think it is: one explanation, deriving from Christianity, is that human...

It does not seem inconceivable to me: especially if one draws a distinction between a universe and the objects in it, it certainly seems conceptually possible. And a brief search on the web suggests that this conclusion is not merely the result of uninformed, armchair speculation: click on this link.

Although it does indeed seem to be the case that agents seem knowingly to do evil--one thinks of Milton's Satan, who says, "evil be now my good"--and that Socratic intellectualism, most clearly expressed, if I remember correctly, in the Protagoras --cannot be correct. But it seems to me that Socratic intellectualism--as it is sometimes called--presupposes a very strong conception of knowledge, one which most agents, including, probably, Milton's Satan, fail to achieve. The basic idea seems to me to be that if one had full or complete knowledge, then one couldn't do evil willingly. (In part because one would thereby know that in doing evil, one was failing to act in accordance with some virtue or another. So Socratic intellectualism seems to be closely connected to the Socratic view that all virtues are connected--the 'unity of the virtues'--and that all virtues are identical to knowledge. Given those assumptions, the Socratic view seems to be plausible; independent of the views attributed to...

I think that it depends on what one is looking for in a definition. Aristotle famously characterized human beings as rational animals. (Of course, if other rational animals were discovered, it would follow from Aristotle's definition that they, too are human beings. So perhaps Aristotle's definition could be modified to constitute simply a definition of 'person' or 'agent': in which case the discovery of other rational beings than human beings would simply lead to the class of persons or agents being enlarged. For what it's worth, such a characterization would accord with Locke's discussion of personal identity in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding , where he distinguishes between the identity conditions of human beings and those of persons: the latter are such that beings other than human beings could fall within the scope of the concept, whereas the former is limited to human beings, that is, beings that look like human beings and manifest the form of life shared by other human beings.)...

First, you should get letters of recommendation from the professors who taught the philosophy courses that you took. If you didn't take classes with enough distinct professors to have the sufficient number of letters--which I take to be an implication of your question--then you should get letters from professors with whom you had a close relationship and who can attest to your general intellectual ability and suitability for graduate work. This won't be seen as a problem, since dedicated Masters programs--such as those at Tufts and Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Virginia Tech, and Northern Illinois, to take four programs with which I am familiar and whose students are generally placed at very good Ph.D. programs (although there are of course other good programs, and you should consult Brian Leiter's Philosophical Gourmet rankings of MA programs for further information--are in the business of preparing students who lack the necessary undergraduate coursework to apply directly to Ph.D. programs to apply to such...

Given that ex hypothesi , the life of luxury in question "relies on exploitation and unjust inequalities," it seems straightforwardly to be wrong to live such a life. For surely it is morally wrong to profit from inequalities that one recognizes to be unjust. If one were to modify the question, so that what was at issue was a life that relied on inequalities and exploitation, then the question would become more complicated: one would need to determine the nature of the inequalities in question, whether one's lifestyle itself contributed to perpetuating them, whether one could, by changing one's lifestyle, change them, and also to clarify the nature of the exploitation in question, to determine, for example, whether the 'exploitation' is, for example, a matter of differences, say, in the wages paid to and the working conditions of factory workers in China as opposed to those of factory workers in the United States. If one were to take up such issues then one would, I think, be engaging issues at the...