In the general muddle of psychological impulses that might come under the category of motivations for a given action, we can distinguish between our principle aim(a) in doing the action, and enabling conditions such as its being broadly in their interests to do such actions. The mere existence of such enabling conditions does not mean that they figure in one's principle aims; the mere fact that it is in my interests to look after my child does not mean that that is my principle aim when I treat her kindly - in particular, it does not mean that my interests are what I have in mind when I treat her kindly. So one might have a situation in which someone - a nice person who enjoys helping others - has nothing more than 'helping my friend' as her principle aim, even while something like 'I'll feel better for doing it' might figure as an enabling condition (it might make it easier to put in the necessary time and effort that the friend needs). We judge people in important part by reference to their...

Yes, I think one can call Hitler an unequivocally bad person. But that doesn't mean he was never nice to anyone. Just as it's not the case that good people never ever put a foot wrong; nor is it the case that bad people never do anything right. Saying he was an evil man is to hold him responsible for the unbelievably evil things he did. There is surely a balance to be drawn here between two extremes: (1) indulging moralistically in calling people bad, and perhaps essentializing evil as if there is a secret in people's hearts as to whether they are thoroughly Good or thoroughly Bad (which is surely a moralistic fiction), and (2) refraining altogether from calling evil by its proper name. We must be honest about the reality of malevolent motives, and horrific crimes, yet at the same time realistic about the causes, which are often social (people who commit the most appalling sexual offences, for instance, are often themselves former victims). Understanding the causes of wrong-doing underpins our capacity...

One liberal conception of how to delineate the proper freedom of expression among conflicting views insists that people have the right to offend each other, and (more positively) that there is a mutual respect inherent in disagreement, even when that disagreement causes offence. Now, if that's the broad political idea in which you situate you're own personal interactions with the friend you describe, then it seems to me that you have a purely personal decision to make about how much offence you're ready to cause/put up with, even if the friend's responses are illiberal in that sense that she doesn't recognize your right to express views that offend her. On this picture of things, you are entitled to any respectfully expressed disagreement with her, but how much you choose to enact that right is a personal matter. (You might simply decide to opt for the peaceful life and avoid the subject.) If, however, her view is that you are not entitled to express your opinions, then you are in disagreement with her...

If one were an ethical relativist, then there's a sense in which the answer to your question is a straightforward Yes. Ethics could only legitimately be a description of the ethical attitudes and practices that were operative at a given time in a given moral culture. If one were a utilitarian, too, so that one thought (roughly) that right action consisted in action which, as a matter of fact, generates most happiness, then once the utilitarian view is stated and argued for, ethics becomes an essentially empirical exercise - finding out what sorts of actions make for most net happiness. But most people probably regard ethical reflection as crucially capable of changing our attitudes, and that means that the basic kind of ethical relativism mentioned above, and also utilitarianism, are too conservative. Human beings are reflective creatures, capable of bringing new critical thought to bear on their attitudes and on what makes them happy, and moral consciousness in particular is surely a matter of...

My own view is that, other things being equal, you do have a special reason to return a good turn; a reason that is lacking in the case where you're considering to do a similarly good turn to a stranger. This is because ethical life is a mixture of reasons generated by a 'partial' perspective (the perspective we take up when we are personally engaged with other people) and an 'impartial' perspective (the perspective we take up when we are precisely not personally engaged, but are acting more like legislators of the good). The place of partial reasons (what the philosopher Thomas Nagel calls 'agent-relative' reasons - after Derek Parfit's use - see ch. 8 of Nagel's book The View From Nowhere ) remains controversial in philosophical ethics. There is ongoing debate about how far any moral reasons should take partial form, rather than a more impartial form that subsumes the values inherent in the partial perspective: so, for instance, one might think that the partial perspective can be honoured by...

Your question raises a crucial issue for ethics, especially in the modern world where the internet makes it sometimes possible to save lives by clicking a few boxes. The issues is how to balance the needs of others, especially distant others, with other priorities that are part and parcel of living a full and meaningful life. One kind of answer is maximally demanding: the more you put your energies into helping others the better. But while a life devoted to relieving suffering may be right for some, a moral theory that made it mandatory for all would surely be excessivley demanding. It would also be forgetful of the conditions of having a meaningful life: having projects and commitments that generate reasons for action of a kind that have nothing to do with relieving others' suffering, or furthering the ends of others. I think it's one of the jobs of philosophical ethics to situate moral considerations in the context of practical considerations more generally, in order to avoid a morality of...

One can perhaps imagine circumstances in which it made ethical sense that someone should sacrifice their own life for that of another person. For instance, one might sacrifice oneself to save one's child. We might feel such an act is an especially good act, a 'supererogatory' act i.e. something above the call of duty. But the idea that one might have an OBLIGATION to sacrifice one's own life for another is a much stronger idea. I doubt there is anything much in Kant's moral philosophy - a moral theory that organizes all acts of moral worth as done out of a motive of duty - to entail the duty to sacrifice one's own life for that of another, but a moral theory that surely does speak to this idea is consequentialism. Basic forms of consequentialism say that the rightness or wrongness of an action consists exclusively in the goodness or badness of its consequences (so motive is irrelevant). Now this tends to generate a standing obligation to maximize the good (however conceived - human happiness,...

I think one has to ask oneself what it would be for 'morality to truly exist'. Most ethicists would perhaps agree that morality could not consist of facts or properties that (in J. L. Mackie's phrase - see his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong) are part of 'the fabric of the world'. That's to say, few people would argue that morality consists of facts or properties that are our there in the world and detectable by any human being regardless of their sensibility. But maybe there's room for the idea of moral facts and properties on a metphysically more modest construal. Compare social facts, such as legal facts. Surely the law exists? and, in any given jurisdiction, it can be a fact that it's, for instance, illegal to steal, or part your car on the pavement, or whatever. These are objective matters about which one can be right or wrong (if one believes that it's lawful to steal, one is making a mistake). This is just one model of morality that would render it an objective enterprise about which one...