The point of voting in a democracy is that one votes in accordance with whatever principles one likes, or none. It is perfectly valid to vote for the best looking candidate, the candidate who has an attractive spouse or partner, the candidate who won when a coin was tossed, and so on. It is perfectly plausible to use any of the principles you mention, but far simpler and subjective impressions are fine too.

I don't see what is wrong with doing things that you want to do in a case like this. One is not perpetually obliged to think of whether one could be doing more for people. Right now instead of responding to this query I might be more suitably employed doling out food for the homeless and the computer on which I am now typing could be sold to provide water for villages in the developing world which require it. I could right now be doing things that save lives, yet here I am selfishly typing away unnecessarily and satisfying my desire to make my opinions public. To allow all my personal interests to be submerged under the interests of others, though, is to dissolve one's personality. For some of course taking this step is in fact a reflection of their personality, but in the example you say you want to bring your children up in a house with a yard. We are not under the obligation to be saints and there is no reason why you should feel guilty about the reasonable ambition to own a yard. ...

I wonder if it is faith. There is an Islamic philosopher called Ibn al-Arabi who argued that for him there was no point in proving the existence of God since He is just so obviously all around us. Here he was thinking of one of the beautiful names for God, al-Muhit, the omnipresent. Suppose someone says that the presence of God is so evident to him that it is like believing that today is Thursday, or that the hands I see banging away on the keys of my computer are my hands. As Wittgenstein says, these are not claims that really one needs evidence for. Perhaps the same could be said for the knowledge that the world is infused with divinity?

There are a few reasons to not just give people what they want. First, how do they know unless they are given alternatives? Secondly, what they want may have dangerous consequences for others and be incompatible with life in a civilized society. The demand for fairness is a basic moral demand and on occasion may well not be popular, but that is irrelevant to its rationale.

I know exactly what you mean, I have always thought that poor old Scrooge got a rather bum deal from Dickens. The trouble with being uncharitable, though, which Dickens gets right is that it harms far more the potential giver rather than the recipient. Scrooge holds onto his money but is miserable and gets very little benefit from it, while those with little who are generous with it and their time also are much happier. In a sense, then, Scrooge sees the light and becomes generous not because he understands he ought to help others, but primarily because helping others helps him most of all.

Emotion is very important in all human activities, philosophy included. Many arguments are fashioned as they are not in a disinterested desire to attain the truth but to get promoted, impress a potential partner, do down an enemy and so on. These might be regarded as cynical comments but then philosophers are usually human beings and they will then have human emotions. One does sometimes just not like a theory and then we look for reasons of a logical kind to disprove it. It could be something about it that raises our suspicions, like someone we dislike propounding it, for example. One thing I have noted is that few philosophers like to admit they have changed their minds on an issue, we normally stick to our guns throughout our careers. After all, consistency is supposed to be a logical virtue.

Why not? Both vegetables and us having being, albeit rather different. I recall a show many years ago which had a very human plant in it, but the trouble with it for our purposes here is that really it was a human being dressed up as a plant, as far as I could see from its behaviour, and so hardly expressive of a very different life form.

I wonder, because it might be argued that in general people would be expected to know the national anthem, and while provision should be made for those who do not wish to, it would be a shame if no-one could sing it at school. After all, it is not as though singing it is likely to coerce one into patriotic feelings that one would be better without, or even better with, since as we know however people are brought up often has very little to do with how they eventually behave or what they believe. I used to teach in a school where a small group of students had to be removed from the classroom whenever Christmas was discussed, since it was held to be a largely secular holiday and they were the children of committed Christians who disapproved of this secularity. Should one have just not spoken about Christmas at all in order not to exclude them? How about if some parents object to music or sex education, should teachers not play music or provide sex education at all? Exclusion is not desirable,...

There is a difference though between saying that the intentions the author evinces in writing his or her text are the meaning of the text, and saying that the text reveals a good deal about the intentional values held by the society that the text represents. Language is public and we do not control it, despite what Humpty Dumpty says. The author does not control the meaning of what is written, but that certainly does not mean we cannot investigate those meanings.

Just because God knows what is going to happen does not mean it has to happen, in the sense that human beings have to do what they end up doing. For example, I always have sugar in my coffee, if sugar is available, but that does not mean that I am incapable of having coffee without sugar. I used to smoke after a cup of coffee, but no longer do so, and here again I did not have to give up smoking. God doubtless knew what I was going to do before I did it, but the decisions to use sugar, and discontinue smoking all belong to me.