This question is difficult to answer in general terms because a number of quite different considerations bear on it. The six most important, perhaps, are these: 1. the magnitude of the impending harm 2. the number of people who would share responsibility for the harm if it came about and, for each of the others, their degree of responsibility (While the harm in your case 3 may be quite large, responsibility for it is also shared by many, and this can dilute that responsibility to some extent. When our country is waging an unjust war and kills a million people, each of us citizens surely bears some responsibility for this war, but not to the extent that one would if one had killed a million people single-handedly.) 3. the cost your getting involved can be expected to impose upon yourself (You have no duty to get involved in your cases 1 and 2 if getting involved would involve a serious risk of getting attacked and perhaps killed.) 4. the degree of responsibility you would have for the...

The predicate "morally wrong" seems to require a victim: someone who is morally wronged. This could by an animal or members of future generations. But, in your case, there's no one to whom a wrong is being done. The same seems true for any and all feelings we might have: Our feelings do not harm others, hence it cannot be morally wrong to feel this or that. To be sure, it can be wrong in certain circumstances to act on one's feelings, to lie about one's feelings, to conceal or to express one's feelings. But merely having them cannot be morally wrong. Another argument to the same conclusion would appeal to the premise that we do not choose our feelings, that you cannot avoid feeling flattered at the moment you have this feeling. While this may typically be true, it is also true that we do have the capacity to modify over time the way we feel. Someone who feels hostility toward members of a certain race or religion can make an effort to get to know good people from that race or religion and...

Nearly all the unbearable suffering in this world occurs among the poorer half of humankind which, collectively, accounts for about 2.4 percent of global consumption and 1.1 percent of global wealth. Are doctors lining up to relieve this suffering? Actually, the opposite is the case. Many physicians trained at great expense in poor countries are lured away to rich countries after their training is completed, sometimes by very active recruitment efforts. So, if you became a doctor to relieve this unbearable suffering, you would be one of a tiny number of doctors, each of whom is -- as best as he or she can --replacing hundreds of doctors migrating in the opposite direction. Check out Partners in Health (PIH) for some more information. If you do not become a doctor, the person taking your place in medical school is very likely to choose what indeed is a replacable job: caring for affluent patients in an affluent country. How many GP's in this country don't even open their practice to Medicaid and...

In dilemmas of this kind, always start by thinking about whether they are really inescapable. One escape in this case it to speak with your sister. If she likes New Zealand, she is unlikely to be indifferent to the environmental degradation that is already so much in evidence elsewhere. Plus you can offer to donate the flight cost to a good cause of her choice, in honor of her wedding. In any case, it is much easier for her to understand and accept the decision if she was herself involved in making it or at least in thinking it through. BTW, I checked your numbers because 4 tonnes seemed like a lot. But you are basically right. A Boeing 747-8 takes a bit over 200 tonnes of fuel (over half its take-off weight), roughly 137 gallons of fuel per passenger. Each gallon produces 20 lbs of carbon dioxide. So that's about 1.3 tonnes per person. But then one tank does not get you there, plus you'll have to fly back as well. So 4 tonnes is a very good estimate. Way too much, indeed.

A nice triplet of examples! Let's say that a person is hypocritical just in case s/he (a) publicly endorses a normative position (such as a moral principle or value or norm or end) as valid for all and also (b) deliberately contravenes this normative position. Your physician may not be hypocritical on this account. Yes, he deliberately contravenes the instruction he gives to you. But he may not be endorsing this instruction as valid for all. Here are some possibilities: (1) He endorses the instruction as valid only for those who seek to be in good health, he assumes that you are among these people (why else would you be going to the doctor?), and he is not himself among them. When charged with hypocrisy, he then responds that he is no more hypocritical than a travel agent who advises you to spend a few days in Paris even though she would never travel overseas. (2) He may endorse the instruction as valid only for those who are still young or as valid only for those for whom quitting would not...

Most citizens, nearly all, disagree with some government expenditures. They think it's wrong to tax us for agricultural or opera subsidies, for drug rehabilitation, for foreign aid, for nuclear weapons, or a few thousand other things. Now we could all cheat on our taxes, each retaining from what we legally owe the proportion that corresponds to expenditures of which s/he disapproves (or disapproves on moral grounds). Or we could defer to governmental expenditure decisions reached through our democratic political process. Once the issue is presented in this more general way, it is clear that there is moral reason to comply with majority decisions one disapproves of -- even morally disapproves of. In a democracy, if you find laws or policies morally objectionable, you ought to present your arguments to your fellow citizens and persuade them to change such laws and policies with you. To be sure, such efforts often fail. But the whole point of democracy is that we defer to majority decisions. Without...

You need to distinguish between the question of what is morally right/wrong and the question of what is generally taken to be right/wrong at some specific time. Slavery was never morally correct but, at most, it was generally taken to be so. (Compare: The earth was never actually the center of the universe, but merely generally taken to be so.) The first question belongs to philosophy; philosophers try to work out what is morally right/wrong, just/unjust, ethical/unethical. The second question is addressed by many different disciplines: by social historians, as you say, but also by anthropologists, sociologists, economists, psychologists, brain physiologists, evolutionary biologists, and others as well. Philosophers have addressed it in some of these ways -- e.g., Marx within his theory of history and Nietzsche from a psychological perspective in his Genealogy of Morals . But philosophers also address the second question as philosophers, namely when the analyze changes in prevalent moral...

The answer depends on what you take morality -- that which moral philosophers are seeking to pin down -- to be . Some philosophers take morality to be a timeless system of norms and values that covers all agents in all possible worlds. Others take morality to be a pragmatic construction that helps human contemporaries to settle their differences peacefully. (These are not the only two options, to be sure, but they are indicative of a spectrum of extant conceptions of morality.) On the former conception of morality, even the most bizarre imagined intelligent life forms can furnish examples and counter-examples. On the latter conception, even the question what our obligations would be if there were only 5 million human beings living on this planet might be rejected as irrelevant and distracting on the ground that the world is not, and will never again be, so thinly populated. Note that the difference between the two conceptions of morality I have distinguished concerns the larger life world or...

There are various papers addressing Singer's argument directly, and they are easy to find. More interesting, perhaps, are more indirect responses that downplay the universalistic claims of morality in favor of special moral ties to friends and associates as well as non-moral commitments. The first of these responses is well exemplified in Samuel Scheffler's Boundaries and Allegiances (especially perhaps the essays "Families, Nations, and Strangers" and "The Conflict between Justice and Responsibility"). The second response is elegantly instantiated in the work of Bernard Williams -- for example in his collection Moral Luck (especially perhaps the essay "Persons, Character, and Morality"). One of Williams' memorable formulations is: "There can come a point at which it is quite unreasonable for a man to give up, in the name of the impartial good ordering of the world of moral agents, something which is a condition of his having any interest in being around in this world at all" ( Moral Luck , page 4)....

There are well worked-over philosophical questions about whether moral propositions have truth values and whether the things referred to in such propositions (duties, virtues, rights, and so on) are discovered or invented or (like irrational numbers) constructed. I assume that these are not the questions you are raising. On this assumption, the answer is yes. It is likely that people after us will be committed to certain moral propositions for very good reasons that we do not yet know or understand. This is likely from the history of moral thought which has yielded such new good reasons numerous times. (All this is closely analogous to what I would say about science and mathematics: It is very likely that new good reasons for holding certain empirical/mathematical propositions will emerge because the emergence of such new good reasons has been a consistent companion of scientific/mathematical inquiry and reflection.) Your question may be motivated by the thought that the subject matter of morality...