Some rights are granted to us by our government, such as the right to drive a car for example. But there are others which governments themselves agree are not granted by them but exist independently. Various governmental documents (such as the Declaration of Independence) speak of "unalienable" or “inalienable” rights, for example. An inalienable right is a right that its holders cannot lose, not through anything they do themselves (waiver or forfeiture), nor through anything others do, for instance through an alteration of the law. In a similar way, the human rights that have emerged in the last 65 years are conceived as not merely part of the law but also a moral standard that all law ought to meet and a standard that is not yet met by much existing law in many countries. Law has incorporated human rights in a way that points beyond itself: to a normativity that does not depend on the law for its existence and cannot be revised or repealed by legislative or judicial fiat or by other law-making...

There is a difference here between what you are legally entitled to claim and the loss you have actually incurred. You believe that it is permissible to claim the former, larger amount. Your wife believes that you should claim no more than the latter, smaller amount. Suppose the difference would only affect the other policy holders through an adjustment of their future premiums. Would you then have an obligation to ask for less as your wife suggests? I think this depends on the prevailing habits and practices among those who would benefit: how are they disposed to act in a case like yours? In the urban world of the East Coast I am familiar with, nearly all those buying insurance would claim no less than they are legally entitled to claim. If this is the prevailing attitude and disposition among the policy holders in your insurance as well, then it is factored into the prices of policies. So you have all along been paying premiums priced to cover people claiming what they are legally entitled to...

I am not so sure that you can get out of your military service simply by saying that you wish to preserve your liberty and don't wish to harm other people. You may know the present situation better than I do, but I know of a number of young Israelis who ended up in jail for refusing to serve in the IDF. I see your justice point: The IDF is protecting the physical security of Israeli citizens (or at least of a large majority of the Israeli population to which you belong), and so it seems unjust for you to enjoy this protection but then also to refuse to contribute to it. You say that there is nothing you can do to avoid being protected by the IDF. If this were true, then this would weaken your reasons to serve. To illustrate, suppose you have a fan who, unprompted by you, greatly improves your reputation by posting admiring stories about you on Facebook, by very effectively singing your praises to important people in your social environment whose support will greatly help your career, etc....

As it stands, the supposition is hopelessly vague. You would need to make it more precise, I would think, to render it falsifiable: what are the relevant respects in which past and future are to be compared? What are the time periods we are talking about? And what counts as resemblance or lack thereof in each of these respects? Without answers to these questions, it's hard to know what would count as evidence pro or con. For example, can the averge price-to-earnings ratio of the S&P500 be relevant to the sought falsification? If so, what's the relevant past period that the future might resemble or not? How far must this ratio stray from the past range for there to be non-resemblance? How long must the deviation last? Are we to look at annual averages or daily fluctuations? Does discontinuation of the index count as non-resemblance? Is non-resemblance of this ratio sufficient to falsify the supposition, or must there be other respects as well in which the future is different? Etc.

Acceptable to whom? I don't think the evidence you provide would or should convince mathematicians. They justify their beliefs about conjectures like this by appeal to proofs or counter-examples. So long as neither is forthcoming, they will rightly suspend belief. But for the rest of us, perhaps the kind of "observational" evidence you suggest might be convincing. Here it would not help much to argue that, because we have found Goldbach's conjecture to be correct up to 10^n, it is probably correct all the way up. One reason this would be unhelpful is that the as yet unexamined even numbers are infinitely more numerous than the examined ones, so we will always have examined only an infinitesimally small sample. Another reason this would be unhelpful is that the examined even numbers are not a representative sample -- rather, they are all very much on the small side, as far as numbers go. So the probabilistic argument would have to go differently. Let's first establish that the two prime...

Suppose someone had made the analogous argument about dividing a line of 1 unit into three equal parts. She tells us that "the length of each of these parts is 1/3 which is 0.333333333333 .... It is never ending. So theoretically we cannot determine the exact length of these parts." I think this would be a bit overblown. We know that the length of each of these three parts is exactly 1/3, and we also know that, while this leads to an infinitely long expression in the decimal system, it would not do so in the duodecimal system (which is based on the number 12 rather than the number 10). I want to suggest that you consider a similar response to your question. Yes, there is a notation in which we cannot express the length of the hypotenuse you have in mind with a finite number of signs. But there are other notations in which this is possible -- we can just call it "sqroot(2)". So, contrary to what you are saying, we can determine the exact length of that hypotenuse. You can refresh...

The answer depends, I would think, on how much money your for-profit company would charge for the service. I don't know the details of your operation, of course, but suppose you have a few employees performing the service and suppose you break even if you charge your customers $17 per hour of any of your employees' time. In fact, let's say, you charge more like $26 per hour, so your company makes $9 per hour, or whatever is left of that after taxes. As the owner of the company, you reinvest some of this money and draw out the rest for your consumption and personal savings. Now in order to be quite sure that you are acting ethically, you could have your for-profit arm charge the non-profit arm a price that does not increase your company's net profit. By using the word "unfortunately", you suggest that you would very much want underprivileged folks to have access to your service but simply cannot provide it charitably. But you can certainly afford to provide it without a mark-up. The less you charge...

Your class of problematic cases is problematic for verificationism only on the assumption that the distinct sentences you pair with each other differ in meaning (refer to distinct propositions). But this is what a verificationist might well want to deny. She might say that, if two sentences coincide in their truth conditions, then they have the same meaning (refer to the same proposition, make the same claim). And this claim can then still be meaningful because empirical evidence can be brought to bear on deciding whether this claim is true or false. Consider (A1) The universe is between 6.23 and 6.24 billion years old. and (A2) The universe was created very recently but everything has been arranged to suggest to human inquirers that the universe is between 6.23 and 6.24 billion years old. If no empirical evidence can possibly decide between these two sentences, then they express the same claim or proposition A. And this proposition is meaningful because empirical evidence can...

Is it possible for a physical object to be four-dimensional? This depends a bit on what you mean by a "physical object". But it seems plausible to say that the could be a four-dimensional world with four-dimensional objects in it, and why should we not in talking about such a possible world call such objects physical objects? I would address your question in the same way. There could be a one-dimensional world, and there could be objects in it. Again, it seems plausible to say of these one-dimensional objects that they are the physical objects of that one-dimensional world. But then again, if someone where to feel very strongly that the expression "physical object" should be reserved for three-dimensional objects, I for one would not want to get into a long argument over this point. Now another question you may have in mind is whether there can be one-dimensional objects in our three-dimensional space. We can certainly describe such objects geometrically, so they are possible in this sense (and,...

I don't think there can be a general answer to this question. Despite your singular ("the person") you are talking about very large sets of decisions, and it just isn't the case that all decisions in one set are better than all decisions in the other. You are certainly right that both factors (lack of practical experience and personal interest) can lead to poor judgments. Fortunately, it is possible to avoid both simultaneously, for example by getting well acquainted with a problem, with the people who deal with it, and with the larger context in which it arises. For example, rather than trying to solve medical ethics dilemmas from your desk in a philosophy department, you can also try to address them after talking with doctors, nurses, patients and their relatives, and perhaps after understanding a lot about relevant medical technologies, treatments, and the operation of hospitals.