Before I begin, let me issue a quick reminder: Not all college sports is big business. Some of it is, to be sure: Big-time college football, basketball, and the like. But college golf, tennis, swimming, and gymnastics don't generate much revenue, except perhaps at the most elite programs, and college sports don't generate much revenue at all at institutions like, say, MIT. So when I talk about college sports and "student athletes" below, I'm talking about only some college sports programs. So, that said, I used to be a huge fan of college basketball. (I went to Duke. Go figure.) Now I hardly watch at all, and the reason you mention is perhaps the most significant. The rules governing (that is, prohibiting) the compensation of "student athletes" were put in place many years ago to protect the interests of such students. For example, there was concern that a student might decide to go to school X rather than school Y, not because school X would better serve that student's long-term interests---which...

There are obviously profound moral issues in the abortion debate, and I for one, while respectfully disagreeing with the Catholic Church's position on the legality of abortion, can't even begin to understand its opposition to birth control. And perhaps it is worth emphasizing, for the record, that it is with this aspect of the Church's position that I disagree. Like most who would defend its legality, I am not a fan of abortion. That said, however, it is unfair to accuse opponents of abortion of the sort of hypocrisy you do. While they may or may not be right in their desire to see abortion criminalized, many of those who hold this view do actively assist pregnant women in placing their children for adoption. The Catholic Church, for example, has long actively supported adoption. That is not to say there have not been controversies in this area, too: Some adoption agencies, especially in Latin America, have been accused of discouraging women from placing their children for adoption. But that is a...

The short answer is that one has to ask whether the analogy is a good one, and my immediate intuition is that it is not a good one in the case of AIDS, at least not as you are using it. To what, in that case, is the expanding baby supposed to be analogous? The AIDS virus? If so, then what the thought experiment suggests is that one woudl be justified in killing the AIDS virus. But of course we already knew that. If the thought experiment is supposed to "justify killing everyone who had AIDS", then, the expanding baby would have to be analogous to a person who had contracted the AIDS virus. But it isn't: People who have the AIDS virus do not pose an imminent risk of death to those who do not, and killing all such people is (fortunately!) not the only way to save oneself, if one has not contracted the virus. Whether the analogy is a good one in the other case is a different question, and one's answer to that question will turn upon one's understanding of the relationship between a woman and the...

I don't think Rand's alignment with Capitalism has much to do with her lack of influence on modern philosophy. It's true, to be sure, that the majority of philosophers nowadays tend to be left-of-center, but there are plenty that are not. To give but one example from recent philosophy, Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia could hardly be described as leftist, but it is an acknowledged classic nonetheless. Similarly, Rand's presentation of her ideas in novels isn't unique. There are writings of Nietzsche's that are in much the same form, and he's still taken seriously. I'm afraid the reason Rand is "so inconsequential to modern philosophy" is rather less interesting: The overwhelming majority of contemporary philosophers find her work to be of poor quality.

I think most people here would agree with much of what you have to say, though with some differences. First, the question isn't so much what the word "right", say, means but, rather, what rights are. And similarly, it isn't so much that people don't agree about what the word "right" means: It's that they don't agree about what rights are, or under what circumstances someone would have one, or what have you. It doesn't follow that all these people mean different things by the word "right". If it did, then it would be impossible to disagree about anything. Second, to answer some questions involving the notion of a right we may not need to know exactly what rights are. This is a good thing, since some very smart people have considered this question over the last several centuries and, while real progress has been made, complete consensus has not yet been reached. Still, for some purposes, as I said, we may not need complete consensus. It may be enough if we agree about certain aspects of the...

It was a central goal of Logical Positivism to discover a criterion for meaningfulness. None was ever formulated that satisfied anyone for very long. There are a couple more specific things to be said here. First, it would not follow that "All faces are beautiful" is meaningless even if, as you claim, "beautiful" was meaningful only if "something can be 'ugly'". For one thing, there may well be other things---feces, perhaps---that are not beautiful, and, as you state your claim, it isn't even required that something else should actually be ugly, only that something can be ugly. So it wouldn't even follow from that claim that "Everything is beautiful" is not meaningful, only that "Everything must be beautiful" was. But I don't myself see why the meaningfulness of a word depends upon its applying only to some things and not to all things. On my view, though not on everyone's view, "exists" is a word that applies to everything. You might say that unicorns do not exist, so that the word "exist...

In the example you give, it seems obvious that there is another interest people have of which you are not taking account, namely, the desire to be "the first on the block" to have the new toy. I suppose one could question whether it is rational to have such an interest, but lots of people clearly do have it, rich or otherwise.

I find this question somewhat puzzling, because it assumes that the only point of studying some subject is to "find the answers". I very much hope that is not true, because I am quite sure that I'll never know the answers to many, if any, of the big questions I spend my time studying. That does not, however, mean I am not learning something along the way, even something important, and making some kind of contribution. I think the same is true of the study (or better, the practice) of religion. I don't expect ever truly to understand life, the universe, and everything, but that doesn't mean I can't come to understand something about it.

This is a version of a familiar argument against radical relativism. As one usually sees it, it involves the claim "All truth is relative", and then the question is whether the truth of that claim is relative. If so, then relativism may well be false, relative to something or other; if not, then, well, there is one non-relative truth. So far as I can see, this argument is solid. Radical relativism is self-refuting. It does not follow, however, that weaker forms of relativism are self-refuting. Indeed, even the view stated as "All truths other than this one are relative" does not seem to be self-refuting. One might wonder what motivation there was for such an odd view, but it does seem consistent. More interestingly, views like moral relativism is not self-refuting: The claim that all moral truths are relative to, say, one's culture is not itself a moral claim and so does not fall within the scope of moral relativism. (That does not, of course, mean that moral relativism is true .)

It is, first of all, worth saying that the work of female philosophers is widely taught in philosophy courses. For the most part, this would be in courses on contemporary issues. As I mentioned in responding to a different question, question 1202 , there are a lot of very highly regarded women in philosophy nowadays. I would be very surprised indeed, perhaps even suspicious, if asignificant amount of work by women were not included in, say, anundergraduate introductory ethics course. In the more technical parts of philosophy, that might not be so. My own introductory philosophy of language courses usually don't include work by women on the main reading list, though there are usually papers by women mentioned as optional or additional readings, and arguments from these papers will get mentioned in lecture. When I teach more advanced courses in philosophy of language, I certainly do include work by women such as Ruth Barcan Marcus, Marga Reimer, or Delia Graff. I take this to reflect the fact that,...