Much depends of how these two lives are causally connected: Why is killing the one necessary to saving the other? One obvious connection is this: A is about to kill B and killing A is your only way of preventing this. In this sort of case, killing A is ordinarily justified (see answer to question 620) -- though there are obvious exceptions as when A's attempt to kill B is justified by the threat B poses to A or to some third party. Another possible connection is that C happens to be in the way of your rescuing D. Perhaps C is blocking your approach to D or your approach, with D, to the hospital, and you cannot get C moved, at least not quickly enough, to accomplish your mission. In this sort of case, assuming C is not intentionally blocking your path to effect D's death, it would be wrong to kill C in order to save D's life. This prohibition, however, is presumably not absolute. So, if there are many people whose rescue C is innocently blocking then it is permissible to kill C in order to...

Think of a world in which everyone -- at least initially, when they come of age -- is entitled to a space of their own with enough space left over for roads, markets, and the like. In that world, it might be fair to ask anyone who wants to occupy more than a fair share of privately occupied land to pay compensation to those who occupy less than a fair share. In that world, you would be entitled to occupy up to a fair share of privately occupied land without paying any rent or mortgage to anyone. Do you have a right that our world be organized in the way just sketched? I think in one sense yes and in one sense no. Yes in the sense that you cannot rightly be forced to make do with less than what you would have in that imaginary world. Many people growing up under feudalism were forced to work for a landowner, and accept his near-complete personal domination, in order to survive. And this was unjust coercion based on leaving people no option as good as what they would have in the imaginary world...

Look at some of the ancients (Homer, Plato, Aristotle) for the idea that ethics is all about becoming and being the best that you can be, leading the best possible life. They had different ideas of what this was, emphasizing different excellences. But they shared the idea that such nobility is not merely what one ought to strive for but something which, with some understanding, one wants to attain. The duty focus of later moralities -- Christianity, Kant, utilitarianism -- is strongly criticized, partly with appeal to the ancients, by Nietzsche and Bernard Williams. See esp. the Genealogy of Morals by the former and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (and perhaps also Shame and Necessity ) by the latter.

It is hard to see why proximity (in the sense of physical distance) should make a difference. The kind of suffering and the nationality of the sufferer may well be relevant, however. Both may provideevidence about your causal relation to the sufferer. And the former mayalso provide information about how severe the suffering is, which issurely morally relevant. You focus on one kind of suffering inparticular: starvation. The UNDP reports some 850 million chronicallymalnourished people, and there are certainly more than this numberagain who suffer intense hunger occasionally. Suffering of this kind istoday pretty much completely avoidable through reforms of economicrules and policies on the national and global levels. Suffering of thiskind may then be suffering for which you and I and many others sharesome responsibility. Insofar as we do, we have more moral reason tocare -- and moral reason to care more. The thought that webear some collective responsibility is very hard to dismiss...

Yes, the fact you cite is consistent with what Malthus claimed. But many other facts are not. There is a strong negative correlation between countries' affluence and their fertility: The more affluent countries tend to have lower fertility, with many affluent countries having fertility rates well below what is needed to maintain their population (Italy's and Spain's are now at 1.28 children per woman, Japan's and Germany's at 1.39, versus 4.96 for Kenya -- find data for other countries e.g. in the CIA World Factbook on the web). The negative correlation holds diachronically within countries as well: As countries become more affluent, their fertility rate drops. This phenomenon can be observed the world over, across continents and cultures. A good example is the Indian state of Kerala. It used to be among the poorer ones in terms of per capita income, but has had a very strong and effective commitment to the fulfillment of basic social and economic needs, including education for women. In...

I don't think "spying" is the word. I would say that both your ex and his friend violated your privacy -- the former by inviting a stranger to witness a conversation you had reason to regard as personal and private between him and yourself, and the latter by accepting this invitation. What they did is presumptively wrong in the same way (though not to the same degree) as that psychiatrist watching, by invitation of your ex, a romantic encounter between you and your ex. The presumption that what they did is wrong can be overcome in various ways. The most obvious is consent. Had you consented to the psychiatrist listening in, then neither of them would have done anything wrong. Since you did not know about the listening in, you obviously had not consented to it. The presumption could also be overcome by prior wrong conduct of yours. Your ex claims that he did not trust you at the time. If you were doing wrong to him at or before that time, and if he had solid reason to suspect this, then he...

Being naturally good in your sense would require knowing without further reflection how one ought to conduct oneself. But the modern societies in which we are participants are far too complex for us to have such knowledge. How can one know, without further reflection, one's responsibilities with regard to the poor and the unemployed, world hunger and climate change, fair trade coffee, quarrelling neighbors, shrinking rain forests, AIDS sufferers, and threatened species? How can one know how much weight (if any) each of these purported responsibilities, and dozens of others, merits, and how they are all best incorporated into a single moral life? I see your point that the answers to some moral questions are obvious, and that it is offensive to raise such questions as if the opposite answer were perfectly respectable. But when philosophers raise such questions they typically have other reasons for doing so. Take a question that strikes many people nowadays as deeply offensive: "What...

It is worth distinguishing two issues: anger that another country applies its laws to one of our citizens; and anger that another country ( any country, actually) applies unjust laws to one of our citizens (to anyone , actually). Though your question seems more focused on the former issue, I think you are really more exercised by the latter. You would be very strongly opposed to Australia hanging a "mule" and to Australia punishing a man for having homosexual relations. And you would not be upset, I guess, if an Australian abroad received a punishment you consider just for some culturally specific crime that does not exist in Australia (e.g., having sex with a woman on the basis of a false promise to marry her while knowing that such sex will make her a total and permanent outcast in her community). As it happens, I am also in Australia and saw a poll last night showing that 47% of Australians want the hanging to go ahead, while 46% are opposed to it. I suppose those 47% think it is...

Philosophy can help convince some, as the efforts of writers like Peter Singer, Henry Shue, and Peter Unger have shown. But most people in the more affluent countries have not been moved by their arguments. It is therefore worth thinking about what else philosophy might do in response to the severe deprivations suffered by so many distant strangers. Philosophers might, for example, question or challenge the common assumption that our morally most significant relation to the global poor is that of potential helpers. In this vein, philosophers can explore the relevance of the fact that great affluence here and great poverty there have emerged from one historical process that was deeply pervaded by wrongs and injustices of the most horrific kinds (slavery, genocide, colonialism, etc.). Are we entitled to the highly privileged starting positions this process has bestowed on us in the face of the extremely miserable starting positions of so many others? If our wealth and opportunities are not,...

One might think that (bad) luck does not exist because the universe is deterministic (running like clockwork according to strict physical laws). I assume this is not your concern. The (bad) luck label might then be attached to things happening to an agent insofar as these things (however causally determined) are better or worse than she could have predicted. In this sense, clearly, luck and bad luck do occur. To be sure, agents will invoke bad luck as an excuse. But this is no reason to reject the very idea of bad luck. After all, such excuses are sometimes valid -- as when the sole copy of your typescript is destroyed by a fire (something that very nearly happened to John Rawls's ATheory of Justice !). And when such excuses are lousy, this can be shown even when bad luck is accepted in principle: We can point out that the outcome was not really worse than the agent could have predicted or that the agent failed to take sufficient account of the risk. For example, we can tell the notorious drunk...