Others can no doubt give more nuanced answers, but most people (I'd be wiling to say virtually all) who earn a living depend either directly or indirectly on government-supported institutions and government-provided infrastructure for the possibility of their livelihood. This includes but is not limited to - military defense against external aggression, a police force, a court system to enforce legal rights, a public education, system, highways... A setting in which a worker can avail him/herself of none of those things is a setting in which very few indeed would prefer to work.

Good for you for taking what's right so seriously! As for general advice, a few quick thoughts. First, though utilitarianism undoubtedly provides useful insights, it's not really clear that utilitarianism always gives the best answers. A quick example: the fact that a mafia leg breaker gets satisfaction and enjoyment from his work arguably carries no weight at all in deciding what's morally best. Perhaps the utilitarian can explain this, but only perhaps. And that leads to the second point. It may be that the study of ethics tends to lead people to better moral decisions, but that's very doubtful. (Don't be so sure that the people on this panel know more than you do.) In any case, it's hard to believe studying ethics necessary for being good. Whether I'd turn to someone for moral advice and whether they've studied ethics don't have much to do with one another. But simply trusting one's gut isn't always best either; gut feelings are often wrong. So what's the positive advice? A good deal of...

Suppose Simon gets enormous pleasure out of humiliating people. Is it okay for him to humiliaite someone just for the fun of it? To ask whether his pleasure is greater than the distress he causes his victim sounds like a very bad way to begin. The pleasure he takes arguably makes a bad situation morally worse. Would we really want to say that the greater his glee, the weaker the case against his conduct? Since you mentioned deontology, we can make a connection to Kant's view. Simon is someone who treats other people merely as means. That gets lost if we simply tote up the consequences. Consequence do matter, of course; you're quite right about that. The question is whether they're all that matters, and the answer seems plausibly to be no.

It's an interesting question, but I'm going to turn your last sentence into my answer: it becomes violence when whatever we're dealing with is not an inanimate object, but is capable of suffering. Could a robot fit that description? It could if its wiring, programming, detection systems and whatever else needs to be mentioned make it able to suffer; more generally, if the thing is sentient. It's a fair guess that whatever the full story, plush toys won't make the cut. Just what that would take is both controversial and in any case hard to say for sure. But if *we* are capable of suffering because of the way our physical bits fit together, then at least in principle, an artificially made thing could have bits fitting together in the right sort of way. The fact that it would be "programmed" isn't a problem. After all, there's a good deal about the way our brains work that we might as well count as programming by way of our brain's Bauplan and the ways we've bumped up against the world. So...

Here's a plausible principle: in general, we shouldn't do things that are likely to make people uncomfortable. This is particularly true if our only reason for doing whatever we're doing is that we get some sort of enjoyment out of it. And if we're in doubt about whether we're likely to make the person uncomfortable, better to err on the side of caution. The principle is actually a broad one, as we can see if we change the example a bit. Suppose the person sitting across the room from me has a very sweet face. There's nothing wrong with noticing, but staring is another matter; that's likely to make the person uncomfortable. This is true even if the s/he has made some effort to highlight facial features. Noticing, even appreciating is one thing; staring, let alone ogling, is another. That's the general advice. In real life, there are lots of subtleties. It's not unusual for one person to notice that another is "checking them out," as it's sometimes put, and to be flattered. That might be...

Your question isn't stupid; variations on it have been discussed many times on this site, and the issue itself has been around for a long time. There's a subtler and a less subtle point. Start with the less subtle. You say "I think that everyone does what he/she feels good by doing. Those who help others, do good to others do so because they feel good by doing so." But this just seems wrong. Most people I know have had plenty of experiences of doing something that didn't make them feel good at all. They did it because it was what had to be done or because it was just clearly the right thing to do. So your claim about the facts seems wrong. You might say (many have) that they know they'll feel bad if they don't do whatever it is that needs to be done, and that this is their real reason. But there are two problems here. The first is that, once again, it's just not obvious that this fits the facts. But it also brings us to the subtler point. Even if as a matter of fact, I feel guilty when I don't...

Let's have a look 1) Either you do what you want or you don't. No argument there. It's a tautology. 2) If you do what you want, you feel good. If you don't do what you want, you feel bad.Putting these together, we get that you feel good if and only if you do what you want. Is that true? I'd have thought not. Most of us have sometimes done things we wanted to do and been unhappy with what happened. Maybe you wanted that extra beer. And maybe you weren't so happy about the massive headache it left you with. Of course someone might say that we only really wanted to do what we did if doing it made us feel good. That's not very plausible, but it also may not matter. Suppose that one way or another, it's really true that we feel good exactly when we do what we want. That brings us to the crucial bit: 3) You should feel good.Really? No matter what the larger result? And in what sense of "should"? Suppose I'm the sort of person who feels good when I kick small children. How does the fact that...

A good point. Usually it's not okay to be rude. It's typically a minor moral offense, but rudeness is generally wrong because it hurts or offends people gratuitously. That said, we can dig a bit deeper. What's rude and what isn't depends heavily on conventions that vary a fair bit. In some settings and circles, it's rude to call people one doesn't know well by their first names. In other settings and circles, it would be rude not to. In this country (the USA), it's rude to slurp your soup. In some cultures, it's the norm and doesn't offend anyone. But there's nothing inherently good or bad about calling people by their first names, and nothing inherently good or bad about slurping one's soup. Not so for killing people. That's prima facie wrong (or, if you prefer, pro tanto ) wrong and it takes special circumstances to make it permissible. The same for stealing. And perhaps deliberate cruelty is just wrong, period. Indeed, if one adopts rudeness as a means to deliberate cruelty,...

A man points a gun and pulls the trigger. The gun fires, and the bullet strikes another man in the head, killing him instantly. Was it murder? Anyone who thinks they can answer the question based on what's been said so far doesn't understand the word "murder." Did the man who pulled the trigger do something wrong? Anyone who thinks they can answer the question based on what's been said so far doesn't understand what it means for something to be wrong. Whether what happened was a murder, and whether anyone did anything wrong depends on a lot that's been left out, not least a lot about who intended to do what and who knew or believed what. Scenario #1. The man who pulled the trigger is a hit man. The person shot was an otherwise innocent witness to a crime. The person who hired the hit man wants to be sure the witness can't testify. This murder and the man who pulled the trigger (as well as the one who hired him) did something deeply wrong. Scenario #2: The man who pulled the trigger is a police...

We need to be careful to avoid equivocating here. What we can safely say is that most people don't do very bad things; the people who do are in the tail of the statistical distribution. However, that isn't enough to count them as mentally ill or disabled. To come to that conclusion, we'd need to know whether the person was able to reason effectively, whether they have adequate impulse control, whether they're subject to delusion, and various other such things. The mentally ill, the addicted and people with various other mental disabilities are - as the word suggests - disabled. In one way or another, they aren't able to function as we are. If a person with severe dyslexia misread a set of instructions and the result was some misfortune, it would make sense to take that into account when deciding how much to blame them. What's easy for most of us (reading instructions) might be much harder for them, through no fault of their own. But if a person's frontal lobes don't work properly and they don't...