It's a fascinating question. When the recruit "sees the elephant," as you put it, they seem to gain something that calls out for an epistemological characterization, but just what they gain is harder to say. The problem is that the obvious suggestions don't seem to work. The recruit already that s/he is mortal. Likewise, his or her probabilities haven't shifted. The recruit presumably already thought that death is certain. So what might the recruit have gained if not knowledge or improved probability judgments? One answer is salience. It's one thing to know something; it's another for it to figure significantly in your outlook. If something is salient for me, it plays a different role in guiding my actions than it does for someone who knows it's true but gives it little thought. On one model, our actions are guided by probabilities and judgments of importance or value/disvalue. But not everything that we know or believe plays a role in our decision-making, and likewise not everything we see as good or...

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli apparently didn't have much patience for what he saw as nonsense. More than once, it seems, he dismissed an idea by saying that it was "not even wrong." I'll have to admit: the idea that one sex is superior to the other in any all-things-considered way strikes me as a plausible candidate for "not even wrong" status. Men and women are different. On average—though only on average—women may have some advantages compared to men, and vice-versa. I'm skeptical that there's some way to accumulate these sorts of on-average facts into some meaningful sense in which women are overall superior to men, or the other way around. And even if there were, there's way too much variation for this to tell us much of anything person-by-person. In any case, the kind of superiority you're concerned about is, as you suggest, not a scientific notion. The kind of superiority you're worried about has to do with whether one sex is in general "better" or perhaps even "nobler" than the other. We...

Music is composed of sound waves, but that's only part of the story. A Fourier analysis would run the risk of including too much information, overlooking the fact that there can be very different interpretations of the same piece. It might be possible to fudge that point. (After all, compression schemes rely on Fourier analysis, but don't include every detail.) The real point is that to be useful, musical notation has to be something that musicians can efficiently read. To make the case that Fourier analysis would be useful for that purpose would be a pretty heavy lift, I suspect. Compare: it would be possible to give a Fourier analysis of a speech in a play, at least as performed by some actor. But I'd be willing to bet that any actor would find it a lot easier just to have the words written down. Musical notation, like written words and dance notation, is able to do its job precisely because it vastly, massively underspecifies the full detail of what any performance will actually be like. The point...

You can and many people do. As for where we can get moral beliefs if we don't believe in God, two unoriginal thoughts. The first is that in our actual day-to-day moral reasoning, most of us—even most religious people— don't base their moral responses on their religious beliefs. There are plenty of reasons to be honest or fair or kind or courageous without scurrying off to scripture. Some of the reasons might also show up in scripture: "Treat others as you'd wish to be treated" for example. But do we really think that someone who has internalized the point of that maxim would chuck it aside if they lost their religion? The second thought is a hard one for some people to grasp; I tend to think of it as a test of philosophical aptitude. The fact that some powerful supernatural being commands something isn't by itself a reason to think it's good. The point is very old; it goes back at least to Plato's dialogue Euthyphro . It goes with a pair of questions for the believer: are things right because God...

Nope. But what of it? "Rationally compelling" is too high bar. If a position really were rationally compelling , a rational person who understood it would have to be convinced. But there's very little in philosophy that meets this standard. There are rationally acceptable ways to believe in God, rationally acceptable ways to believe that there's no God, and rationally acceptable ways to be agnostic. As for what the reasons are, that's a long story, though I'd caution against thinking they can be reduced to slogans. Of course, the same point goes for more or less all claims that philosophers debate. But somehow, some people seem to think the case of religion is different.

An incomplete answer, but relevant, I hope. Suppose the question is: did Prof. Geisler show up for class on Monday? We ask students enrolled in the class. All the students who were there in the room at class time say yes: Prof. Geisler was there. In fact, she arrived on time, and taught a full class. Let's grant that every person in the room had a slightly different take on exactly what went on in the room at that time. Let's also grant that some of what some people would say happened will be inaccurate, and may reflect their biases and psychological idiosyncrasies. The question, however, is whether Prof. Geisler showed up. There's no reason to think these differences in perception got in the way of judging that . In one way this is a trivial example, but it reflects something extremely common. Even with our very real quirks and biases, there's an enormous amount of what we perceive and believe for which those quirks and biases are simply irrelevant. Individually, most of these facts may be...

Lots of questions there. I'll offer three comments. The first is that if citizens simply get to pick and choose the laws they follow, then we don't have laws at all. The question of what makes government coercion legitimate is a big one, and I'm not a political philosopher. But if governments are ever legitimate, then it will also be legitimate to prevent people, by force if necessary, from simply ignoring laws they don't like. The second comment is about this:           In other words, the government gained a massive benefit at the expense of the citizens. I'd suggest there's a confusion here. The government isn't a private corporation. Money that "the government" has is money that the State has, and, if the State isn't corrupt, the government (the institutional embodiment of the State) uses the money for the benefit of its citizens. It's not stowed in secret bank accounts that government officials can draw on for their own benefit. Finally, is it ever justified to break a law that does more...

This strikes me as a particularly easy question. The answer is no. Among other things, you seem to be making two assumptions. The first is that the suffering prevented by destroying everyone outweighs all the the happiness and satisfaction that would also be prevented. That's already pretty unobvious. But in fact, as you've stated your view, you'd even be justified in wiping out people who would get more satisfaction than suffering out of their lives, since I assume that "everyone" means "everyone." I don't see a scintilla of justification for that. The more serious problem is in assuming that because this is how you see things, it would justify wiping everyone out, no matter what their view of the matter might be. That's a pretty extraordinary thing to assume. I'm not about to accuse you of being satanic. But the view you're offering might deserve that label.

You've asked an interesting question. I'm not going to say much directly about whether this person is doing wrong. I'm going to say some things more in line with a remark of John Austin's in a very different context: "If only we could forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy." (From Austin's "A Plea For Excuses.") What seems interesting here is more at the level of moral psychology than broad moral judgments. The counterpart for daintiness or dumpiness that came to mind was creepiness. I suspect I'm not the only panelist who found your first few sentences creepy. I'd stress that this isn't a way of saying that you are creepy, but let's try to bring the creepiness reaction into clearer focus. I don't know of any philosophical literature on creepiness, but this piece from a website called Family Share gets the basics right: https://familyshare.com/21482/7-signs-youre-a-creep (Thanks to Taimur Khan for that link.) What you describe triggers the...

If the evidence favors the view that we don't always make decisions by reasoning, then philosophy needn't disagree. If the truth of the matter were that all of our decisions—including decisions about which views are more plausible—amounted to post-hoc "rationalizations," then it's hard to see how philosophy as we usually understand it would be possible. But the evidence doesn't come close to showing that. Anyone seriously engaged in doing philosophy implicitly assumes that s/he is capable of giving reasons and being swayed by them. But that's different from assuming that we always exercise that capacity or that it never misfires. A related thought: even if the reasons we give are often after-the-fact rationalizations, it wouldn't follow that our decision our our belief is unreasonable. The underlying mechanism that brought us to our decision or belief may be well-tuned and suited to the task it was performing, even if we have little or no conscious access to how the mechanism really works. Being...