In addition to Allen's points, it should be noted that not everyone agrees that the issue of abortion boils down to the issue of whether the fetus is a person. Judith Thomson has famously argued that other persons do not have a right to use my body, even if preventing them from such use would cause their death. For example, if I had a rare blood type and was taken into custody an hooked up to someone who needed blood of my type, this would be a violation of my rights and I would be permitted to resist, or unplug myself. Because a fetus is using the pregnant woman's body, sometimes against her will (think of rape especially, but also contraception failure), she does not have a moral obligation to allow such use. In some cases it would be very kind of me to allow such use, e.g., if it wasn't at great cost to me, but even if we count the fetus as a ful person, it doesn't have a right to such use. See: Judith Jarvis Thomson : A Defense of Abortion . Philosophy & Public Affairs , Vol....

There are two separate questions here, one more general and the other more specific. On the general question about whether it is wrong to do something to someone (or for someone?) if they desire it but don't consent to it, I would argue that in most cases it is wrong. One might desire something, but not approve of that desire. For example, Alice might want to have sex with Bob, but because Bob is married, not approve of that desire. In such cases, Alice might not consent to sex with Bob, even if Bob could know full well that Alice desires it. If Bob were to pursue Alice further, knowing of Alice's desire, I think that would be clearly wrong. The general point is that there is more to showing respect for someone than showing respect for their desires, especially if they themselves are critical of their desires. The more specific question is how we should decide how to act if a person is unable to consent. Your proposal seems to be that we should act on what we know to be the person's desires. ...

Good question. If race is a morally irrelevant feature of persons, to what extent should it matter (if at all) in deciding how to act? To begin, it is worth noting that there is huge controversy about what to make of our ordinary racial categories. There seems to be a fairly wide consensus amongst geneticists that there is no meaningful genetic or biological classification that maps onto the racial classification system that we currently use in the US. So some have argued from this that 'races' are illusions. However, it is compatible with this that our racial terminology actually picks out social groups, i.e., groups of people who are viewed and treated in a certain way within the dominant cutlure. It seems fairly clear that people who appear "white" and people who appear "black" or "asian" or "hispanic" are viewed and treated differently within our culture. So when you suggest that by treating people of color differently Whites are "affirming they are different based on their color",...

I'm not a Kant scholar so can't say much helpful about your interpretation of Kant (the contradiction test has always puzzled me), but there is an assumption in your argument that seems worth questioning. You suggest that if everyone listened to alternative rock, it wouldn't be alternative anymore, and so there is a contradiction in generalizing the maxim. But I wonder if it is essential to alternative rock that it is "alternative"? It seems to me that alternative rock is a kind of music (I kind I like a lot) that is not defined by its being alterantive, but by the norms of the genre. There are kinds of rock that aren't mainstream, but aren't "alternative rock" either. They are just unpopular. So "alternative rock" is not equivalent to "unpopular rock" or "non-mainstream rock". Philosophers sometimes distinguish two ways of using descriptions. One way is to pick something out, but once you've picked it out using the description, you can talk about that thing even in contexts where it...

Even if you are right that each of the options you describe is difficult to accept, I'm wondering how you can possibly treat "this whole existence thing" as a hallucination or a complete joke? Are you saying that you don't take the question seriously (but do take your and others' existence seriously), or are you saying that you don't take existence seriously? If your point is that you don't think it is worth continuing to ask the question, I can sympathize; but I would suggest that you may want to think a bit more about (a) whether there are presuppositions that are responsible for the seeming incoherence of each option, and if so what they are, and (b) whether there are questionable presuppositions of the question. I note, in fact, that you don't actually forumate a question, even though you are considering possible answers. What, exactly, is the question you are seeking an answer to? Is it "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Or "What is the cause of everything, i.e., the whole...

On this topic, I have always been intrigued by Simone de Beauvoir's comments in the introduction to The Second Sex. She says: But we do not confuse the idea of private interest with that ofhappiness, although that is another common point of view. Are not womenof the harem more happy than women voters? Is not the housekeeperhappier than the working-woman? It is not too clear just what the word happy really means and still less what true values it may mask. There is nopossibility of measuring the happiness of others, and it is always easyto describe as happy the situation in which one wishes to place them. In particular those who are condemned to stagnation are oftenpronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being atrest. This notion we reject, for our perspective is that ofexistentialist ethics. Every subject plays his part as suchspecifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode oftranscendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reachingout...

There are lots of complex issues here (as in the previous question r#1796 referred to). In response to the earlier question, I focued on rights and obligations because those were the terms in which the question was asked. Prof. Soble emphasized there that many other moral considerations are relevant in intimate human relations, e.g., what would be virtuous, nice, religiously required, what one should do out of a sense of duty, justice, or reciprocity, etc. I was not answering a question about what would be virtuous or just, but what is obligatory. I took obligations to be closely tied to rights. So I was not asserting that there are no other moral considerations in matters of sex as he seemed to read me, but only that there are some important rights and obligations that are relevant to whether one has an obligation to have sex in marriage. But it is difficult to articulate what rights and obligations there are, and this current question rightly demands clarification. First, we might want to...

As you might expect, the answer to your question depends on what conception of justice you hold. One sort of utilitarian maintains, for example, that the right distribution will be the one that maximizes the greatest amount of welfare over the long run. So it will be permissible to have short-term inequalities if they promote welfare overall. If equity is a factor in welfare, then on this view it is OK to have short-term inequities in order to gain long-term equity. It is unclear, however, to what extent equity is important to maximize welfare. Another approach, then, would be to accept a consequentialist view that does not focus entirely on welfare, but recommends maximizing other goods, such as equity. However, one complaint about utilitarianism, and consequentialism generally, is that it ignores the rights of individuals. So it is important to consider the sorts of things being distributed. For example, would it be permissible to deny voting rights to some people now if doing so would...

This isn't really an answer to your question but, rather, a point I find interesting about the framing of your question. (You could still ask your question in slightly different terms, of course...) Although the idea of a "placebo effect" is common, there is actually some reason to doubt that it is "well-documented". A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine by Asbjorn Hrobjartsson and Peter C. Gotzsche, (May 24, 2001) argues tha t the trials aiming to establish a placebo effect are, for the most part, not sound. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/344/21/1594 For example, in some cases the studies don't take into account the fact that the condition of some percentage of people will improve without any medication at all. Although the studies compare people who take medication with people who take a placebo, they don't always compare people who take the placebo with those who take nothing. This, as you might expect, doesn't settle the question, but...

I don't know anything about Anglophone philosophy programs in Vietnam, but I would guess that if the websites don't have English translations, the program isn't an Anglophone program. If you are interested in translations, one way to find a translator is to advertise on Craig's List. There are Craig's Lists in many major US cities. http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites.html