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Business

Mutual funds differ in their investment targets but more and more they are just indexes and in aggregate they essentially bet the entire market all the time. They must do this because of their size and inability to hold to much in any individual stock. Does this not turn the stock market and Wall Street into a total sham or time bomb when there is no real connection between investment and business fundamentals. This is not the question of dart boards this is the question of an unending river of money showering down on firms fortunate enough to get into the listing. In general firms do not pay dividends. Clearly this is nation trying to subsidize its base of firms but what does it do to consumers? Is this not a Ponzi scheme?

I don't know what mutual funds you are thinking of, but many of them are totally different from your description of the market as a whole. You can invest in a vast variety of different kinds of funds, including those that pay big dividends. There is a close connection between the health of the real economy and the stock exchange and funds which are broadly invested will go up and down with the general market. It is not like a Ponzi scheme where the underlying assets are negligible compared with the investments in them, if you invest in a railroad or a store you own a share of something real, as you do with financial institutions and the streams of income they generate. Occasionally these investments prove to be bad, over-priced, managements make mistakes, and investors lose money, or we just buy high and sell low. That is the nature of the free market, you take risks and sometimes things do not work out, but that is no reason to condemn the market as a whole. There are perhaps other good reasons for...
Knowledge
Mind

In December of 2011, I was invited to speak to the police concerning a former roommate of mine who has been accused of murder (and posted a question concerning that here on the site). Just this week, I received a notification that I am to appear again, this time in court, to testify as a witness. Having heard horror stories of people with faulty memories being imprisoned for a year or more because they provided false testimony without knowing they did so, or because their testimony didn't overlap with what they told the police, I am now very worried (I am an expat living in Germany, and I've not yet been able to talk to a proper lawyer to determine how strict the laws concerning court testimony are). Perhaps that is somewhat narcissistic of me, given the circumstances, but the fact remains. I wonder, then, what kind of "truth" I am supposed to tell the court. The truth seems to be that I *believe* that my former roommate behaved in way X, spoke of topic Y and didn't speak of Z, with my only...

Yes, something the court has to take account of is the passage of time since the event and it is entirely reasonable for your memory to be an issue that has to be taken into account. You may be closely questioned on this and to be honest you will have to be frank on how reliable at this stage you think your memory is. You gave evidence in the past nearer the event, and if you still think that evidence was true the fact that you now no longer have the same relationship with it is not that relevant, I should have thought. It is what you said then that is probably most significant, even if now your memory of those events, or even if now what you then thought they were, is rather vague. Nothing to worry about legally, although don't quote me if you are sent off for hard labor!
Art

This semester I started attending a seminar on (I'm translating from German hear) "The Meaning of Art". The professor began with a long-winded speech about how most people, hearing the title, would no doubt assume the topic is the role of art in our lives. He then went on to say that the question of art's role in society/our lives is incoherent if we don't first develop an understanding of the nature of art itself (particularly to what extent it is communicative), and that we will therefore focus more on the question of the nature of art rather than its role. This seems, to me, to be backwards. Art doesn't exist in presocial a void. How are we supposed to understand the nature of art without looking at the role it plays in society? I would think that especially the question of whether art is communicative can only be answered by looking at whether it is used to communicate, i.e. its role in society. Am I misunderstanding the claim, or is the professors approach genuinely backwards?

Let me make a remark in support of your long-winded professor, and I am afraid that sort of pedagogy does rather go with the discipline. I think your professor is right, and perhaps he felt he needed to make the point at some length, as often happens in such cases. Art does have a role in society, but then so do many things, and unless you know what art is, how can you distinguish between its role and that of other cultural forms? Many things are used to communicate also, and not all of them are art, so it is worth spending some time deciding what art actually is first.
Ethics

This question has been keeping me up for the past few nights, I can't seem to put it to rest. Maybe someone here can help. Do the ends justify the means? The example I've been using is would you rather kill a serial killer directly, or through your inaction let that killer kill twenty other people? My philosophy is that there is no "indirect cause of death", and that if you have the ability to prevent that killer from killing those twenty people, and you do nothing, you're as guilty as the killer himself (just to make this scenario fool-proof, let's say you know he is about to kill those people and the only way to prevent him from doing so is to kill him). Am I wrong? why or why not? Any help anyone can offer in this department is helpful!

Well, I do not know if my comments will set your mind at rest and allow you to get some sleep, although I am told that reading my material is very helpful to those with insomnia. I think you are wrong, there is a difference between letting something happen and doing it. In the real world we never really know what someone is going to do until they do it and we should wait to see what they do, other things being equal. On the other hand, if someone is on the point of carrying out his or her nefarious action, there is no reason why we should not intervene, if we are able to do so. When I started graduate work in philosophy I had a supervisor, Elizabeth Anscombe, who argued that had it been possible to predict what Hitler was going to do, and had it been possible to prevent it by framing him on some criminal charge, it would be wrong to do so, since he would not have been guilty of that charge. One can see her point, it would be wrong, but given the context perhaps excusable. For her nothing could...
Sport

When playing games, be they sports, board games, video games or what have you, there are almost always fixed rules, and violating these rules is usually accepted to be illegal within the game. However, there are also often informal rules of good sportsmanship and fair play which would prohibit certain kinds of behavior. However, such informal rules aren't explicitly a part of the game, and it seems that violating them is still within the rules of the game. If a person participates in a game, expecting good sportsmanship of some kind or another, but is instead treated to a game where their opponents demonstrate poor sportsmanship, is it within the player's rights to complain about that poor sportsmanship? Has the player been wronged? It seems that on the one hand, in consensually participating in a game without explicit rules of conduct punishing poor sportsmanship, the player has set themselves up for a situation in which they have no right to complain. On the other hand, it seems entirely...

They are legitimate since implicit rules are important too. If we all play as though the rules of sportsmanship are being observed and someone does not, then he or she gains an unfair advantage and others can rightly object. It is all a matter of establishing an even playing field, and if there is not general agreement on how the game is to be played, then at least we know what to expect. Once there is such agreement, the occasional malefector will have an advantage over others, something which will itself often be dealt with on the sportsfield in an informal and painful way!
Love

Can a person love their country in the manner that those that claim to love their country love it? For the sake of the question any country is relevant.

I think so. Love is so arbitrary anyway that it is difficult to set limits for it. It might be said that it is ridiculous to claim to love a country since one might have been born a citizen of some other country, but then we do not think it is ridiculous to love a particular person, even though we might not have met that person in which case presumably we would have fallen in love with a different person.
Philosophy
Science

Stephen Hawking, in his recent book entitled The Grand Design, states that philosophy is dead. Without going into the reasons behind his thinking, I'd like to know the response of current philosophers to Hawking's statement. He has laid down a gauntlet of sorts, a challenge to philosophers to make their work relevant to the recent advances and discoveries made by cosmologists, astrophysicists, and others on the cutting edge of scientific discovery and investigation. Are present-day philosophers up to Hawking's challenge?

As far as I can see, no philosopher has given up the profession on the basis of Hawking's argument. This should come as no surprise, it would be like turkeys voting for an early Thanksgiving. Philosophers are used to scientists telling them that science has resolved longstanding philosophical problems. Even if it had, that very statement would itself be a philosophical and not a scientific topic, and so would require philosophers to examine it.
Ethics

Is internet piracy "theft"? This is a frequent point of debate, with one side saying yes, because the pirate is gaining access to something they didn't pay for, and the other side saying no, because the pirate isn't taking anything *away* from somebody else (i.e. nobody has less of anything than they had before the piracy). I'm not asking whether internet piracy is *harmful,* I'm asking whether it belongs to the category "theft" (as opposed to copyright violation, for instance).

First of all, copyright violation surely is theft. It harms the author since he or she is not paid for the work. With internet piracy it is not a question of money, perhaps, but identification of who is using the service. Since the person paying for the service will be identified with the internet addresses visited by the interloper, and this might be disadvantageous, it could be said to constitute theft of his or her good name. This could have financial consequences. I think the harm issue and the financial consequences issue are jointly significant here. It is not like my enjoying the smell of your soup which costs me nothing but costs you nothing also. It is rather like my sticking my nose into your soup and preventing you from enjoying it in the space to which you are entitled by your ownership of it. Of course, you do not know it is done so it is more of a virtual nose than a real nose, but the consequences can be serious, and so morally this is questionable behavior.
Philosophy

Some of the answers that philosophers give on this site do not reference any particular philosopher or philosophical argument, and to my eye, would not be easily distinguishable from the answers that an interested, well-educated, thoughtful person might posit. What makes the philosopher's answer different?

Nothing really, all that past and present philosophers try to do is present interested, well-educated, thoughtful responses to theoretical issues. Except for showing how well-read one is, little is to be gained by citing chapter and verse of a particular authority.
Language

If language limits the things we can think about, and we can only think about things that our language is capable of discussing, how then do we create new terms that describe things previously not incorporated into the language?

Just because we use language to express our thoughts, it does not follow that the limits of language are the limits of our thought. For one thing, we can and do change and extend language to incorporate new ideas that cannot fit into the existing language. It is rather like the ways in which science changes. Given the theory of a particular period, an alternative way of looking at the world is literally incomprehensible, but eventually the old theory is seen as having so many holes in it that a new one is required, and the crucial terms in the old theory are often changed or stretched to make sense of the new theory. If language was fixed and immutable, then this would present huge problems for changes in thought. Fortunately for the possibility of development in our ideas, our language can also develop.

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