An interesting question. Let's start with the word "chance," which you seem to see as an essential part of luck. If I follow you correctly, we have chance, hence luck, only if determinism isn't true. I think we'll see that what people mean by "luck" doesn't presuppose indeterminism, but let's start with your golfing example, Joe tees off and his shot goes wild. That's not what he wanted to happen and not what he was trying to do. However, there happens to be a rock in the right place, his ball hits it and ends up in the hole. That he did want to happen. Was he lucky? Since this seems to be a paradigm case of luck, we'd need a good reason for saying otherwise. Although it's doubtful that a real-life Joe intended to sink a hole in one (golfers seldom do), let's suppose he did. Given how things turned out, Joe himself would surely consider himself lucky: he got what he wanted but the way it happened was nothing like what he had in mind. He didn't intend to swing wild, he didn't mean to hit the rock,...

A perfect replica of reality would be like reality in all respects. It would contain trees—real trees. It would contain people—real people. It would contain fake butter—real fake butter. And if it were a perfect replica, everything in reality would be in the replica. So in every sense that matters, it would be real. But I have the feeling you're worried about how you can know that you're not systematically deluded or deceived about more or less everything. This was Descartes' question in Meditations . He thought that there was one thing he couldn't be deceived about: that he was having doubts and therefore that he, the doubter existed. From there to anything substantial, like trees and people and electrons and burritos is a long way. Descartes thought that just by reasoning about it, he could prove that there's a God who is not a deceiver, and therefore that even though he was no doubt wrong about some things, he wasn't systematically wrong. Most philosophers don't think his argument was very good....

First, let's ask what relativism means. The usual understanding is that it says what's right and wrong is not universal, but relative to some non-universal reference point—the predominant opinions in one's culture, typically. Your question appears to assume that relativism is the only good explanation for differences in behavior, but it's not clear why we should believe that. After all, many differences in behavior are matters of preference. I prefer to eat chocolate ice cream; you like rum and raisin. Neither of us is wrong, and relativism is neither relevant nor useful in explaining the difference between us. I like swing dancing; you don't. I don't like playing basketball; you do. We'll behave differently on that account. But neither of us is "right" or "wrong," and once again, relativism doesn't provide any additional insight. Wh do our taste in ice cream differ? Why do we prefer different leisure activities? Who knows? The answer is probably a complicated mixture of a lot of things,...

Setting external world skepticism aside for a moment, suppose I'm about to roll a die. Now there are two possibilities: it will come up 1 or it won't. If I reason as you did, I will conclude that the probability is 1/2 that the die will come up 1. Something has gone wrong here. For one thing, we can't get the answers to probability questions just by counting. There are many ways to slice up the space of possibilities, and if we use your rule, the answer we get will depend on how we do the slicing. This is a well-known problem, and there is no simple fix. But there's another problem: the probabilities here aren't chances. They are degrees of belief. Even if we thought (though we shouldn't) that the right way to slice things up is that our experience has an external source or it doesn't, without adding anything more fine-grained, we don't have to agree that the two possibilities are equally probable. You say "it seems to me that both possibilities are equally likely." It's worth wondering whether you...

I’m guessing that what you think is that every question has a satisfying answer — an answer that explains what we wanted explained or tells us what we wanted to know. And so my question is: why do you think that? For the record, I don’t think it’s true, or at least I don’t see any good reason to suppose that it must be true. Here’s an example. We can send electrons, one at a time, through a certain sort of magnetic field (one oriented “inhomogenously” in a particular direction.) The electron will respond in one of two ways: maximum upward deflection or maximum downward deflection; nothing in between. So suppose a particular electron passes through the field and is deflected upward. You ask why up rather than down. The most widely-held view among physicists is that there is no answer. The most widely-held view is not that we just don’t know, but that which way the electron went is a matter of pure chance; nothing explains it. Now this may be wrong, but there are serious reasons for...

My understanding is that Buddhism teaches the doctrine of anatta — "no self." This doesn't mean that there aren't people in the ordinary sense. It means that there is no underyling metaphysical substance that amounts to the self. But I'm not aware of anything in Buddhism that would fairly be described as solipsism. So "the internet" got this one wrong (except for the thousands of places where it gets it right. as for thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc., people do think, they do feel, they do have emotions. Or better, perhaps, there are thoughts, there are feelings, there are emotions. But they aren't tied together by some underyling soul or mental substance. The Scottish philosopher David Hume held a similar view. On Hume's view, a person is a "bundle of perceptions," though that's a bit too crude to get it right. In recent philosophical history, Derek Parfit developed a view that he would be the first to admit owes a great deal to Hume and to Buddhism. As for minds and consciousnesses, it...

Here's a way that might help. Suppose there are two pieces of paper in front of you. One of them is a genuine $5 bill. The other is a perfect counterfeit. In fact, suppose that it was illicitly created by the very same equipment that created the real bill. The point is that the difference between the real $5 bill and the fake isn't a matter of the physical properties of the piece of paper. A similar point holds for the home run. There are certain things that have to happen physically for something to amount to a home run. But with a little imagination, we can tell a story on which what's "really" going on has nothing to do with baseball. It just looks for all the world like a real baseball game. But to be a home run, the physical events have to be part of an honest-to-Babe-Ruth baseball game. Without the right intentions, rule-following, etc., no set of physical events amounts to a baseball game. There are physical regularities in a baseball game, but some of the most important things have to do...

When I was a young man, I knew someone who was, in the phrase that might have been used at that time, "mildly retarded." He was married. And he understood his condition. And he struck me as a happy man. He certainly wasn't leading a life of misery. In the neighborhood where I now live, there is a young man who is even more intellectually challenged. I doubt that he understands his condition. But he does not strike me as unhappy at all. To be sure, he lives a simple life. And no: he couldn't live on his own. And he also won't have "accomplishments" in the sense you have in mind. But near as I can tell, he's not miserable at all. He's happy. In his case, I don't think marriage is an issue. But the larger point is the important one: intellectual ability and happiness are quite different things. There are sad, miserable geniuses and thriving, happy people whose IQ scores are well below 100. So what I'm saying is that I don't accept the premise of your question.

The first point is that "Is it natural?" and "Is it wrong?" aren't the same question. We could spend a lot of time on what it means to call something "natural," but you seem to have something like this in mind: if there are species that do it routinely, then it's natural. If that made things acceptable, then the fact that in some species, the female kills the male after sex would mean that it would be okay for a woman to kill a man after having sex with him. Don't know about you, but I'd say that seems like a pretty good counterexample to the "It's natural, therefore it's okay" idea. As for why eating animals might be wrong, I dare say you've heard many of the reasons that some people find persuasive. Some have to do with the consequences for the animals. Others are of a quite different sort. For example: our meat-eating habits are a significant contributor to global warming. Raising animals for food accounts for just under 15% of greenhouse gases. See https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/30...

Like my colleague, I agree that you've put your finger on a potential moral problem with necrophilia. However, I have a worry about the rest of his analysis. My colleague writes: "I think the more primordial objection to necrophilia is that most of us see the good of sexual intimacy as the loving union of two persons." I certainly don't disagree that this is a good of sexual intimacy, but aside from the question of whether it's the good, I have a different worry: even if the loving union of two people is the good of sexual intimacy, it wouldn't follow that other forms of sexual activity are morally suspect. The most obvious case is masturbation. I've never seen anything that struck me as a plausible argument that masturbation is wrong. A standard Catholic objection is that all sex acts should be "open to the possibility of procreation," as some Vatican documents put it. My own view is that this is bad as theology, and worse if one doesn't accept theological premises. Another objection is that it...