Philosophers can bring reflection on the responsibilities that contributors to global pollution have toward foreigners, future people, and animals and the rest of nature. Foreigners. Global warming is likely to cause severe harms to foreigners -- from draughts in Africa to flooding in Bangladesh -- especially to foreigners who are poor and vulnerable (who, for this reason, are themselves only very minimal contributors to global warming). Most of us shrug off the thought that we owe them anything. We think it's alright to pollute or that our individual contribution is too small to matter. Is this an adequate response if millions die prematurely as a result of the pollution we together produce? Future people. Global warming is likely to have devastating effects far in the future. In cost-benefit analyses, it is common to discount the interests of future people, typically by 3 percent per annum. This is thought plausible in analogy to how individuals discount future pains and pleasures -- we are...

A good approximation is this: A moral reason for action is one whose application and weight is (taken to be) independent of the agent's preferences. Many reasons for action depend on the agent's preferences. For example, that a certain program starts at 9pm is a reason for you to head home only if you want to watch this program -- and the weight of this reason depends on the strength of your desire. That reading makes you wiser, or ice cream makes you happier, is a reason for you to read or to eat ice cream only if you want to be wiser or happier. All selfish reasons are of this kind. The fact that a child will drown if you don't rescue her is (normally understood as) a reason for you to rescue the child and, more specifically, as a reason that applies to you, with a certain weight, regardless of your preferences. It is then (understood as) a moral reason for action. We can refine this explication by distinguishing motivating and normative reasons. A reason that actually motivates...

Human beings can and do change. They may lack important attributes at one time and yet come to possess them later. So we must choose whether to tie the ascription of humanity in the relevant sense to attributes they have or to ones they can have. Your formulations go back and forth between these options. I think we should choose the latter option. Only if we do can we firmly include infants and small children within the domain of humanity and human rights. Moreover, we should guard against our susceptibility to error, esp. when we feel anger and hostility. We should avoid demonizing those we hold in contempt, we should honor our own humanity by treating them humanely rather than as beasts that may be subjected to any imaginable form of torture and degradation. (The possibilities of error and demonization are amply and shockingly exemplified in the horrors committed in Abu Ghraib.) If their humanity can emerge at all, this is most likely to happen through treating them humanely, not through...

Your reasoning appeals to a false dichotomy. You assume that either we give monopoly pricing powers to inventors and thereby effectively deny access to recent drugs to poor patients or we allow generic companies to compete and thereby effective deprive inventors of their rewards and of funds for new research ventures. But there are further options. One would be to allow generic companies to compete immediately (thereby reducing the price of a new medicine to near the marginal cost of production) and then to reward inventors in another way, for example with a reward (out of public funds) proportioned to the impact of their invention on the global disease burden. All patients would benefit for much cheaper access to recent drugs, and taxpayers would pay a little more. Millions of lives would be saved through this innovation -- not merely because poor patients get access to cutting-edge drugs, but also because biotech and pharma companies would gain an incentive to research remedies for the...

Such conditions or expectations would not be wrong when giving money to a friend or colleague. Seeing the holes in her shabby sweater, you might give her some money and ask her to buy a new sweater with it. And you would then expect that, if she accepts the gift, she will use it the way you stipulated. So why should matters be different with a homeless person? The obvious answer is: because you owe him support. OK, you don't owe support to every homeless person, but you do have an obligation to do something to support some of them. And because it's an obligation, you may not attach conditions or expectations -- just as, when you own money to your landlady, you may not attach conditions or expectations regarding how she should spend your payment. I am not convinced by this line of argument. I accept that we have an obligation to support the homeless. This includes an obligation to help them meet their basic needs (esp. when our society is doing too little on this score). But it does not include...

We sometimes play certain social roles in which it is morally appropriate to disregard certain otherwise weighty considerations and to give great weight to others than one could otherwise disregard. Examples. A trustee should try to find the best possible investments for her ward without regard to how such investments of his funds would affect the value of her own portfolio. A judge or juror should set asides her likes and dislikes of certain kinds of people. A legislator should disregard the impact pending legislation would have on her son's business. The common idea here is that important social purposes are best promoted if the occupants of certain roles understand them in these ways. The lawyer's role is somewhat unusual because it is fitted into an adversarial system. The idea behind such a system is that the socially best outcomes are achieved when some of the protagonists do not aim for them but for something quite different. To get the most exciting soccer match, we need players...

An absolute right is presumably one that cannot be outweighed, forfeited, and/or alienated. (Such a right can still be waived -- e.g., by allowing your doctor to show your medical records to someone you nominate.) Let's look at these three issues with regard to the assumed moral right to the confidentiality of one's medical records. It seems evident that this right can be outweighed. Suppose, for example, that a society faces a serious risk of a pandemic involving a life-threatening and highly virulent pathogen (ebola, avian flu). May such a society require doctors to notify the authorities of any positive diagnosis so as quickly to isolate the patient and prevent contagion? With potentially millions of lives at stake, any right to confidentiality must surely give way. Less confidently, I would also think that the right in question can be forfeited, at least in part. Here is a possible case. Suppose the right is not outweighed by the danger to a single person. So, even where AIDS is still a...

Neither, I would think. Inflicting pain is not immoral in itself, because it is sometimes necessary for the patient's health and authorized by the patient for this reason. Dentists inflicting pain are typically not acting wrongly. Even when pain is not associated with simultaneous or subsequent bodily or psychological harm, it may nonetheless be wrong to inflict such pain. For example, some people suffer no physical or psychological damage from mild torture (weak electric shocks administered for brief periods, say). It is nonetheless wrong so to torture such people just for fun.

There are obviously different readings of Kant's relevant texts as well as different views on what is the systematically most plausible interpretation of his phrase. With this caution, let me give it a try. Treating someone as a mere means contrasts with treating her or him also as an end in itself, as a person whose dignity and whose permissible ends have conduct-guiding importance. This suggests that we need to describe your two cases in a bit more detail. One more detailed description might depict tennis player A as wholly indifferent to B's dignity and to the fulfillment or otherwise of B's permissible ends. Here A helps fulfill B's end of playing a good game of tennis, but only because this serves A's own end to do the same. Should A come across an opportunity to take advantage of B (ridiculing B in public to good effect, exploiting a financial emergency, etc.), A would readily do this so long as A is confident of finding a comparable substitute partner in the event that B no longer wants...

There are all sorts of regulations about this in different jurisdictions, but I assume you are interested in the moral prohibition and the reasons for it. I don't think it's wrong in general for teachers and students to become romantically involved with each other. It is wrong only when they also have a student-teacher relationship, or a potential student-teacher relationship. I believe that, in such cases, becoming romantically involved is always wrong. This belief is plausible only if the word "potential" is understood in a robust sense. Otherwise any romantic relationship involving a teacher would be wrong (because it is always possible for the other party to become this teacher's student). So I mean it in a robust sense: You are potentially my teacher only if I am a registered student in a unit of a university in which you teach -- a graduate student in your department, say, or an undergraduate in your college -- even if I have not taken a class with you. Such student-teacher...