Following Kant, we might distinguish hypothetical imperatives from categorical imperatives to answer your question. Hypothetical imperatives tell us what we should do given our aims. Categorical imperatives tell us what we should do, full-stop, regardless of our aims. Moral imperatives (our moral duties) are taken to be categorical imperatives, and they can be expressed using "should": You should not murder, you should not lie, you should show compassion to others, etc. But hypothetical imperatives can also be expressed using "should". If we're talking to someone who wants to go to law school, we might say, "You should take the LSAT." If we're talking to someone who wants a good challenge, we might say, "You should read some Kant." If we're talking to someone who wants to be a model, we might say "You should get plastic surgery." If we're talking to someone who wants to commit murder quietly to avoid getting caught, we might say, "You should use poison." None of these "should" statements are...

Following up on what Prof. Solomon says, you might want some way to assess each case on its merits. So you might think about what makes an affair wrong. Is it the betrayal of the spouse, or the effects that the affair has on the spouse? Some people might think: if my spouse had an affair, then even if I didn't know about it, and even if it made him behave nicer to me in the long run (perhaps because he came to appreciate me more), it would still be wrong because he would have betrayed me. On this view, the betrayal is bad independent of any effects it has. But some people locate the very badness of the betrayal in its effects: my spouse treats me poorly, spends our money indiscriminately, etc.; maybe other people, treat me differently as a result of the affair (they might look down on me and think I'm a fool, etc. etc.) And of course, maybe the affair leads to a breakdown of the marriage, which has all sorts of devastating consequences... Now, regardless of whether you think that the affair...

One book you might be interested in is Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio (although Damasio is a neurologist, not a philosopher).

Speaking of sick jokes: I just typed a long answer to your question and then hit the wrong key before submitting it and now poof, now it's in the ether. But alas let's try again. In Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy it takes Deep Thought 7 and 1/2 million years to compute the answer to the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. On the day the answer is to be revealed, the people are understandably excited: "Never again will we wake up in the morning and think Who am I? What is my purpose in life? Does it really, cosmically speaking, matter if I don't get up and go to work ?" And then the answer comes: Forty-two. The people are, to put it mildly, disappointed. When pressed, Deep Thought tells them: "I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is." So what is the question of meaning that you're asking for? What are you looking for, that you're not able to find? Some philosophers,...

I don't think your question is strange at all. In fact, many philosophers of mind have been pre-occupied with just this very question for quite some time. Then again, perhaps that just makes us strange! It might help to start by being clear about what exactly you mean by consciousness. Sometimes we talk of being conscious in the sense of being awake as opposed to being asleep, or as opposed to being passed out after an overindulgence of some sort. Sometimes we talk about being conscious in the sense of being aware , so we might sometimes be conscious of the ticking of the clock and sometimes not. Philosophers often talk about consciousness in a third sense to refer to the subjective aspects of our experience. To use a phrase brought into play by Thomas Nagel, there is "something it is like" to smell coffee brewing, or to see the vivid colors of a sunset, or to have a sharp pain in your toe. This is often referred to as phenomenal consciousness, and trying to find some way to...

It's okay -- no offense taken! It's often hard even for philosophers to explain exactly what philosophy is. But here's a passage from philosopher Thomas Nagel that I think might give a start to answering your question: “The main concern of philosophy is to question and understand very common ideas that all of us use every day without thinking about them. A historian may ask what happened at some time in the past, but a philosopher will ask, ‘What is time?’ A mathematician may investigate the relations among numbers, but a philosopher will ask, ‘What is a number?’ A physicist will ask what atoms are made of or what explains gravity, but a philosopher will ask how we can know there is anything outside of our own minds. A psychologist may investigate how children learn a language, but a philosopher will ask, ‘What makes a word mean anything?’ Anyone can ask whether it’s wrong to sneak into a movie without paying, but a philosopher will ask, ‘What makes an action right or...

You raise an interesting question, one that philosophers have worried about. Assuming that there's no afterlife, and that once you're dead you're dead, then how can someting that happens after your death harm you? After all, you're not around to experience it. This presupposes, however, an experiential account of harms. And we might think that there can be harms that exist outside of our experiences. Suppose that your best friend secretly hates you and is talking about you behind your back, although she's perfectly pleasant to you and so her behavior has no effect on your experience. Would you mind? Insofar as you would mind, and I certainly would, then you probably think that harms can occur outside of experience. And so, even though the Marquis no longer has any experiences, maybe he can stil be harmed or benefitted by things that occur. Then again, your institution may not even have any pretense of having a celebration that's for the value of the Marquis himself. It could have value...

One good book to look at on this topic is Fred Feldman's Confrontations with the Reaper . (What a great title, isn't it?) There Feldman engages in an extensive discussion of how hard it actually is to provide a good definition of death. What he calls "the standard analysis" says roughly that death is the cessation of life (or, perhaps, the irreversible cessation of life). But as Feldman argues, this view runs into all sorts of problems. In particular, consideration of cases of suspended animation, fission, and fusion, raises trouble for the standard analysis. When a living cell undergoes fission, is ceases to live, but does it die? When someone contracts to have themselves placed into suspended animation (See, e.g., Suspended Animation Inc. ), they have ceased to live, but have they died? Ultimately, Feldman concludes: "though death looms large in our emotional lives, though we hate it, and fear it, and are dismayed by the thought that it will someday overtake us and those we love, we...

Let me try to tackle a different aspect of your question: Why should we respect the wishes of someone who has died? This depends on how you view harm , and whether you think someone can be harmed after his or her death. One way of thinking about this question is to think about whether someone can be harmed even if that harm does not impinge on their experiences in any way. Think of Truman in the movie The Truman Show , and imagine that the producers of the show were just a little more skillfulat keeping the deception going, so that it really was completely seamless. Truman never knows that he is being deceived, and from his point of view, his life is just find and dandy. So is he harmed by the deception? If, like me, you have the intuition that he is -- even though he doesn't know about the deception at all and even though the deception has no negative impact (in fact, it has quite a positive impact) on his experience -- you have some inclination to accept that harms can exist outside of...

I agree with the posts above on the decisiveness of Hume's criticisms of the teleological argument in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , but thought I'd add one point on the other side. In The Blind Watchmaker , Richard Dawkins suggests that he "could not imagine being an atheist" before Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859. Dawkins suggests that "although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." Dawkins argues that "what Hume did was criticize the logic of using apparent design in nature as positive evidence for the existence of a God. He did not offer an alternative explanation for apparent design, but left the question open." It was only with Darwin that a plausible alternative explanation was provided.