There certainly are Muslim political theorists who would agree with what you say, and who insist on subsuming everything under religion, including issues of nationalism and government. Even sport is regarded critically as an institution that can lead people to identify with areligious entities and people. There is nothing uniquely Islamic about such a view, many religions not unnaturally regard our relationship with God as our most important relationship and interpret everything else as linking up with this relationship in some way, if it is to be worth pursuing. Religious fundamentalists as you describe them do not have to accept such a view. Other aspects of our lives may also be regarded as important, although not perhaps as important as our religious life and all that goes with it. John Locke wanted Roman Catholics in Britain to be denied equal rights with Anglicans since he assumed the former, unlike the latter, would take their orders from the Pope, a foreign potentate. I am old enough to...

The parents and you may indeed be miserable, but who is to say that the patient has so little quality of life that she would be better off dead than alive? As you say, we might be more inclined to pull the plug were she to be older and we could say that the patient has at least had a life and has nothing much to look forward to in the future. But in the case of a child, and even an older person, the vagaries of what can happen to a person are so various and hard to predict that it is difficult to be sure of her outcome in any case. It might be argued that one of the criteria of an ethical society is one where those who are having severe physical and mental problems are treated as humanely and professionally as possible, despite the expense and the trouble it causes. Life can be miserable and yet even within a severely limited form of existence there are possibilities of satisfaction that it would be a shame to deny someone because we no longer kept them alive.

I doubt that there is a distinction to be made between kitsch and the sentimental. What is wrong with these aesthetic categories is that they are so undemanding. I very much enjoy both, especially the little cute things one can hang from bags, like the small animals and symbols, and also the emotions induced by country music. Both readily produce pleasurable emotions in those conditioned to enjoy them, but they have no depth. Except for irony, there is no way of using them to extend our understanding of what we are seeing or hearing. That is not to say that there is anything wrong with them, it is just that they have a limited use and once that is over, they fail to resonate with us. There is no good sentimentality. As Kant suggested, if we are to make aesthetic judgments we need to hold our feelings in abeyance.

I think you are quite right. Philosophers know no more than anyone else about anything except the structure of arguments. There is no real wisdom apart from this. If there was, it would be difficult to understand disagreement, as in applied ethics. Where there is disagreement, how can we tell who has the real wisdom? Is it one party, no-one or everyone, to some extent? When we analyze arguments there is some prospect of resolving issues, at least to the satisfaction of a particular thinker and his or her understanding of the arguments. It is always problematic to think of some people as having a real insight into an issue which is separate from an argument about it. Real wisdom perhaps resides in recognizing this.

Many would say that it is always wrong to kill civilians even if that would result in far less military deaths, since civilians are basically innocent and it is never right to do evil so that good may result. This is even the case if the civilians are nasty people who have nothing but hate in their hearts for the enemy, they are still civilians and as such are not ethical targets of death. That is certainly the position of international law. For consequentialists the situation could be quite different, since the relevant question is what course of action would cause least suffering overall. A problem with such a strategy is that there is probably a horrible action that would affect the enemy to give in quicker, but just could not be considered ethically (say it was possible to murder a number of babies, for example). Another problem is that it is so difficult to work out what the balance is between civilian and military deaths, and once we start thinking in these terms it is difficult to know...

If we only talked about things we are expert on, very little would be discussed. In any case, there is no reason to think that experts know more about many topics, especially those in ethics, than anyone else. The sort of knowledge involved here is not like the factual and technical knowledge one needs to fix something, for example. Obviously my doctor knows more about what ails me than I do, in most cases, but even that does not show that my views are of no significance at all, since I may have a good grasp of how it feels like to have a particular medical issue and that might be relevant to treatment and cure. I may know what worked in the past and what did not, while he or she may have little information about that. I remember a curator of an art exhibition saying that she did not only include work in the exhibition that she liked, but she had to respect it. That is a useful expression here. If someone has thought a bit about their ethical stance that is enough for their views to be respected....

One always has to be aware of the nature of the audience when one speaks about anything, especially an important topic. You would not want to antagonize someone or put them off a particular type of thought by addressing them inappropriately. Your phrase "personal limitations" is not helpful here, we all come from different backgrounds and have limitations, and the successful speaker is someone who can use that to make his or her point nonetheless. Talking down to people is never a useful strategy.

On the other hand, there certainly have been cases where social services have removed children from parents where children have become obese, and the parents have been taken to be at fault.It seems to me to be an issue that needs to be considered on a case by case manner. There may be something in the parents' behavior that encourages obesity in the children, in just the same way that a parent may be in trouble with the authorities for letting their child play by a road. We tend to think that although many parents are not ideal, it is generally better for children to be brought up by them than by removing them and trying out alternative carers for them. There are clearly cases though where parents do not take account sufficiently of the dangerous situations in which they place their children and intervention by the state is then justifiable. Obesity could well be such a situation, especially given the wide range of ailments to which it leads.

For Kant the key issue is whether a maxim can be universalized. If it can it is something we ought to act on, if not then not. We have a clear criterion then of when we should morally observe a state law. Can a maxim based on it be universalized?

Chess is surely a blend of the deductive and the inductive. The rules and legal moves are linked to each other deductively, but how they are applied has to take account of other factors, like the style of the opponent and the ability to hide strategy, for instance. Some players do not respond well to aggressive moves and others do, so that would come into how one approaches particular games, while other opponents can be confused by certain moves that get them into time trouble, and so those moves would have as their goal precisely that. We need to form a view of our opponents and that is certainly not deductive knowledge, but arises from what we know of them or what we can pick up during the game, and for many people it is this mixture of the deductive and the inductive that makes chess such fun.