I'm not sure that "most people would have a hard time imagining" how a woman's forcing herself sexually on a man could cause lasting and profound trauma for the man: some people might well have difficulty imagining how this could be the case. Perhaps such 'imaginative resistance' would be due to certain ingrained and long-standing assumptions about sexuality, including the canard that males always want sex, and therefore could not be forced to have sex. Even if some do share such assumptions, I myself do not find it difficult to think that a woman forcing herself sexually on a man would be no less a violation than a man forcing himself sexually on a woman: what's crucial in these cases, to my mind, is that the sexual relationship is in some way coerced and, hence, is not freely entered into by both parties. (To be sure, the nature of the coercion might differ in the two cases: whereas one might think that a man forces himself by force on a woman, in most cases, given the disparities...

You're absolutely right on in how you're thinking about the difference between Kant's approach to moral philosophy and that of his predecessors. Kant's predecessors took morality to be based on something external (such as, for example, God, or the achievement of some end), what Kant called 'heteronomous' conceptions of morality; Kant thought that morality consisted in autonomy , the capacity of rational agents to determine the rightness or wrongness of actions by a law that they gave themselves. (On the relation between Kant's ethics and that of his predecessors, I highly recommend J. B. Schneewind's magisterial The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy .) This law that agents gave themselves, Kant suggested in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals could be tested in particular cases by trying to determine whether one's intention--or, to use Kant's technical term, one's 'maxim'--could be universalized. (Note that there are various formulations of this...

This question raises a very deep metaphilosophical issue. Before treating it, however, I want to sharpen the question a bit, for you raise several issues that I think need to be distinguished. You might be taken to be asking whether, as a matter of empirical fact, some person who is a professional philosopher or who is now recognized by professional philosophers as a philosopher (but might not have been seen as a professional philosopher because s/he was not a part of the profession of philosophy or because the profession did not exist when the philosopher in question was active), could be an 'early adopter' of new moral beliefs; the third question that you raise might be seen as a corollary of this way of taking your question, asking for a prediction, based on an induction from the history of philosophy, as to whether it should be expected that a philosopher should be an early adopter of some new moral belief. An alternative way of taking your question is as raising the issue of whether philosophical...

This is a very interesting nest of questions!! The relation between law and morality has received considerable discussion from philosophers and is a fascinating topic. I treat the first question that you raise, and then turn to the very different question with which you conclude. I myself am not inclined to think that being law abiding has anything to do with one's moral consciousness. In order to be law-abiding, one need only obey the laws. And in order to do this, one need only know the laws, one needn't even understand them. So even basic legal knowledge is not a condition for being a law-abiding citizen. Indeed, it may even be the case that law and morality can come into conflict, in which case moral consciousness would not only not be a sufficient condition for being a law-abiding citizen, it might even lead one to break laws. (Cases of civil disobedience are relevant here. If you haven't read it already, I recommend that you take a look at Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government,"...

"Private," Hobbes writes in Leviathan , regarding the nature of beliefs, "is in secret free." These words are, I think, absolutely correct, and pertinent in the context of your excellent question, regarding whether agents have a right to hold whatever beliefs they wish, and whether other agents--and maybe even the state--have a right to correct those false beliefs. Hobbes's point is that the state need not concern itself with agents' beliefs, provided that those beliefs are not made publicly manifest; similarly, insofar as agents' beliefs do not interfere with the lives of others, then the state, and indeed, most other agents, have no right to try to change those beliefs. I am inclined to think that this point is broadly correct, since I'm inclined to favor minimal state interference with individuals. There is a question, however, whether agents have an epistemic duty to try to achieve true beliefs. This topic was the subject of an exchange between William James and W. K. Clifford, in which...

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...

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...

I don't think that there is any need to justify one's ethical or moral beliefs: religion, for example, is a traditional source of the moral commitments of many people, but religion differs considerably from philosophy in that philosophy seeks, unlike religion, to give reasons for certain beliefs or commitments. Consider some moral precept advanced, for example, in the New Testament; the principle in question may well be true, but no justification is given for it in the New Testament; a philosophically inclined believer might, by contrast, seek to provide some rational justification for the principle. And this is a distinctively philosophical contribution to our lives. As Alex George, the creator of this website, writes in the Preface to the second volume of questions derived from this site, What Should I Do? Philosophers on the Good, the Bad, and the Puzzling : "The goal of acting ethically is quite elusive....Philosophy can be of some value here. Philosophers, after all, have been in the...

This is a wonderful and fascinating question, which goes to the heart of the relation between morality and legality. It does seem that the moral status of an action might well be determined by the intention with which the action is performed (in part because depending on one's intention, one may well perform the same external act--say, give money to charity--but act very differently--one might give to charity in order to help others, or in order to get a tax write-off, or to impress one's friends--and so it seems to me that the nature of and the respect to which an act reflects morally on an agent can vary depending on her intention in performing the act. Of course, however, it might well be the case that no one but God can really know the intention with which someone acts--agents themselves may not know their own intentions very well, as Freud and empirical psychology have argued--and so intentions cannot be taken into account in determining whether some external act is in conformity with or...

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...