I do not disagree with this, nor (I suspect) would most philosophers. The story of The Matrix is possible .But as long as we're talking about possibility, your situation might beeven worse than the one depicted in the movie. At least in the filmwe're all sharing the same, collective hallucination, but it might bethe case that you're the only one plugged into the Matrix.Perhaps you don't even have a full body; you might be just a brainfloating in a vat of nutrients and connected to a computer that isfeeding it electrochemical signals. In the Meditations ,Descartes famously considers an even more radical possibility: theentire material world could be an illusion. You could be a disembodiedghost dreaming that you have a body or a disembodied mind beingdeceived by a malicious and powerful demon into believing that there isa material world. Philosophers usually discuss outlandish thoughtexperiments such as these in order to raise questions about thepossibility of knowledge. Does knowledge...

The view you're expressing--that everything about us is caused byexternal factors, and that this rules out the possibility of free willand moral responsibility--is often referred to as hard determinism . One classic defense of this view can be found in The System of Nature by Baron d'Holbach, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment. For amore contemporary and scientific defense of the view that free will isan illusion (albeit one written by a psychologist rather than aphilosopher), try Daniel Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will . Hopefullyyou're also interested in reading the views of philosophers whotake a different approach to this vexing problem. If that is indeed thecase, you might want to investigate one of the many wonderfulcollections of essays on the subject. My favorite is Free Will , edited by Gary Watson for the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series. The similarly named volume edited by Robert Kane for the Blackwell Readings in Philosophy series is also...

It's been a long time since I last read Ayer's comments on morality and religion, and so I don't have much to say in response to that aspect of your question. However, it seems clear that the force of morality cannot depend on the coercive sort of authority you describe, whether that authority is wielded by God or the state. God's threats of punishment carry no more moral weight than anybody else's. And so if murder is wrong because God forbids it, God's authority must extend beyond his (admittedly impressive) power to cast us into hell for all eternity. The sort of authority that morality is supposed to have is not the coercive authority of reward and punishment, but rather what philosophers often call normative authority . (Precisely what this sort of authority amounts to remains the subject of much philosophical disagreement.) As I mentioned in my response to a different question , many philosophers think that normative authority must ultimately be independent of God's...

Does it have to be a fluke that we have evolved in the way you describe? Our perceptual and conceptual apparatuses have evolved such that our perceptual beliefs largely match what is "really out there," and so why should it be a surprise (or a fluke) that our ethical beliefs match what is really good? The point of this question is merely to point out that the fact that we have evolved to think a certain way is not by itself a good reason to reject that way of thinking. That said, your concluding question is a challenging one. How can we decide what is really good or ethical? This question can seem particularly vexing if we think that the laws of morality or the "rules of life" must somehow be "out there" in the world, waiting like the laws of physics to be discovered and understood. But philosophers have long questioned whether values must be "external" in this way in order to be genuine or real. Perhaps our judgments about what matters--about what is valuable or moral or rational--are not...

Does something need to have "application" in order to be of value? Idon't know what sort of application the symphonies of Beethoven or theplays of Shakespeare have, but these works of art are of greataesthetic value. Space exploration is (at least in part) about thepursuit of knowledge. We explore space in order to come to a betterunderstanding of our home--the universe of which we are, it seems, avery small part. That seems worthwhile to me. (And of course it's worthbearing in mind that many inventions of great practical applicationhave come about as the result of experiments conducted merely in theinterest of scientific discovery.) That said, your point iswell taken; there are certainly more pressing needs at the moment. Andthe (roughly) one trillion dollars it would cost to put together amanned mission to Mars could be used to feed and take care of a greatmany people in need. Who knows how many diseases we could cure orfamines we could avoid with that sort of money? To answer yourquestion, then,...

The answer to your question depends in part on whether and how the moral status of a fetus differs from the moral status of an infant. One might reasonably think, for example, that there is no significant difference in moral status between a fetus the day before its born and an infant the day after its born. The only difference seems to be one of residence: one resides inside a uterus, and the other resides in a hospital's maternity ward. And we don't normally think that where one lives is especially relevant to one's moral status. Thus, if it's wrong to kill one, it must be wrong to kill the other. That said, one might also reasonably think that there is a significant difference in moral status between an embryo that is only two weeks old--a cluster of cells that looks something like this --and a newborn baby. And if there is a significant difference in moral status, then it is perfectly consistent on one hand to defend the right to have early-term abortions but on the other to oppose...

At the turn of the last century, G.E. Moore famously argued that the word "good" can't be defined. Goodness, according to Moore, is simple and (hence) undefinable.The same might be true of the word "value" and its cognates. Of course, there are some definitions that promise to be relatively uncontroversial. We mightsay, for example, that something is valuable if, and only if, it is worth pursuing or promoting. Alternatively, we might say that something is valuable if, and only if, we have a reason to pursue or promote it. Both of these definitions are at least prima facie plausible, but they are also rather uninformative. By asserting that "xis valuable" means the same as "x is worth pursuing," we have merelysubstituted one phrase in need of definition for another. That is, the terms "worth" and "reason" seem to be just as mysterious asthe word they are supposed to replace: "valuable." This suggests that we need to look for a more substantive definition. Moore, however, claimed...

There is at least one good consequentialist reason for punishingattempted murder less severely than murder. If the two crimes arepunished equally, then the law will not deter someone who has tried andfailed to murder from trying again! To the extent that the"successful murderer" is simply luckier than the "failed murderer,"your question raises the vexing problem of moral luck . Consider the following two cases: 1. John drives after drinking way too much at lunch and is pulled over almost immediately and arrested. 2.Jack drives after drinking way too much at lunch and almost immediatelyruns over and kills a family of four crossing the street. Itseems that there is no morally relevant difference between these twocases. That is, the only difference between them seems to be that Johnwas lucky enough to have been pulled over before he could cause anyserious harm. Yet (at least in our current criminal justice system), wepunish Jack much more severely than we do John. John is charged...

Most of the standard ethical theories have a decent following amongprofessional philosophers. You'll find compelling arguments for andagainst all of them. I tend to lean in a vaguely consequentialistdirection, and so I'll just mention my favorite anti-consequentialist hypothetical: the case of the inhospitable hospital. Imaginethat you've just injured your ankle playing squash, and so you head tothe hospital for an x-ray to make sure your ankle isn't broken. Asyou're waiting in the emergency room, four victims of a nasty caraccident are brought in. Each is suffering from a different internalinjury (heart, liver, kidneys, and lungs), but all four are in criticalcondition and need an immediate transplant if they are to survive.There is no time to find a donor, and so the doctors grab you out ofthe waiting room, give you a large dose of morphine, and then proceedto harvest your organs in order to give them to the accident victims.They all survive, but sadly you do not. It seems that the...

I'm only moderately familiar with Rand's work, but one of my colleagues at the University of Michigan has a webpage devoted to refuting some of Rand's most well-known arguments. If you're interested, you can find it here .