At least in the USA, the premise of the criminal justice system is that the burden is on the state to establish guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt." And there are various reasons why we might want to stick to that standard. It's not a good thing when a guilty person goes free, but it's also not a good thing when the state has low standards for establishing guilt. And so the usual idea is that everyone is entitled to a vigorous defense. Even if the lawyer believes in his/her heart of hearts that the client is guilty, the question for the judge and jury is whether the state's arguments and evidence make the case.

Suppose Will writes a will, disinheriting his children out of small-minded spite and leaving all his wealth to Bill, who already has more than enough money and no significant connection with Will. Doesn't sound altruistic to me! And even though Will won't be around to watch his children's faces when the will is read, Will might well get a passel of perverse pleasure playing the scenario over in his mind while he's yet among the living. So no: exectuting a will could be an act of pure nastiness, not least because the very act of composing it has psychological consequences for the testator in the here and now.

The feat of imagination here isn't quite as straightforward as it seems. Do the slaves have the same basic capacities as the slaveholders? Would the slaves vastly prefer not to be slaves? Would the slaveholders really, genuinely agree, after thinking it through, that had luck turned out so that they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, or been born into families of slaves, it would be perfectly acceptable for them to have been enslaved? Is the practice of slaveholding generally bad for the slaves? Does it generally make their lives much more painful, fear-filled and miserable than the lives of the slaveholders? You get the drift. What makes slavery wrong, so the story would go, are various facts of the sort that the rhetorical questions above point to. In some times and places, people may have been ignorant of those facts, or may have lulled themselves into ignoring them. But chances are that anyone who was prepared to offer a defense of slavery would end up saying a bunch of...

I'm having a bit of trouble finding the argument here. Let's take a "transaction" that most of us think is just fine: accepting a proposal of marriage. If Pat agrees to marry Robin and then gets cold feet, Robin can't force the issue. But what of it? Or take another example: I agree to buy your house. I sign the contract. And then I back out. In most jurisdictions, far as I know, you can't sue me for specific performance; you can't force me to buy the house, though there are various damages that you would be entitled to recover from me. As things stand in most places, a contract for an act of prostitution isn't enforceable, and so Travis has no legal claim against Elise -- particularly if she gives back the money. But suppose that these sorts contracts were legal, since your issue is presumably with people who think they should be. In that case, there's still no reason to think that Travis has some sort of right to rape Elise, though depending on the legal regime, he might have a civil...

I recall someone describing one of his colleagues, a well-know proponent of "rule utilitarianism," as "right in principle, wrong in practice." And more generally, I think you're right: being a capable ethical theorist doesn't make someone able to give good moral advice. I dare say every member of this panel can think of his or her own illustrations of this point. It's not just because the person and the circumstances matter; most every moral philosopher would agree with that. It's also that theoretical and practical skill are often not strongly correlated. To this we might add that experience, a feel for certain kinds of real-life details, and that elusive thing we call wisdom are all qualities we look for in people we seek moral advice from. That said, philosophers can sometimes help people think through certain kinds of issues for a couple of reasons. One is that they've often run into similar questions before and been part of extensive discussions of them. Another is that philosophers are often...

Let's start with money, which is also a good thing to end up with. Whether the piece of paper in my pocket is money isn't something that depends just on the intrinsic properties of the piece of paper itself. As someone once put it, the fact that something is money is an "institutional property." It depends on a complicated lot of social facts. Of course, if you BELIEVE it's money, I may be able to get you to part with your pet parakeet in exchange for it. And if you believe it's money, that's most likely largely due to non-monetary properties like shape, color, etc. And so someone might say: the monetary properties of the paper are causally inert. What does the causal work are its more metaphysically mundane properties. But that seems to slice things a bit too crudely. Even if monetary properties are "institutional" or "social" properties, the fact that the institution exists and that some things really are money has all sorts of causal consequences, and the fact that something really is money (has the...

Perhaps we could make a distinction. Perhaps we could all agree that ideally , we'd all steer clear of hypocrisy. The phrase "good hypocrisy" has a strange ring, suggesting that nothing would count. The phrase "tolerable hypocrisy," however, is less strange. Few of us, if any, manage to steer clear of hypocrisy altogether, and it's doubtful whether it's morally healthy to worry too much about one's moral health. (In this connection, Susan Wolf's paper "Moral Saints," from the Journal of Philosophy August 1982 makes interesting reading.) So we can agree that no one should be condemned simply for not being absolutely beyond condemnation, but we can also agree that hypocrisy isn't a good thing. After all, if I'm being a hypocrite, my sin isn't just posing as someone who acts in accord with a certain principle. Quite aside from the dishonesty in the way I represent myself, to count as a hypocrite I have to be doing things that by my own lights, I shouldn't be doing. And depending on what those...

And... as someone with a close relative who is on the high-functioning end of the autistic continuum, I'd like to add Tony Attwood's website and books to the list of recommendations. But I would agree emphatically with Louise: it's a mistake to think that autistic people are unaware of others' feelings, or incapable of empathy. And I really can't see that you'd be doing anything morally wrong at all by continuing the relationship. Having Asperger's or high-functioning autism doesn't make someone morally defective, and it doesn't mean they can't care deeply about other people. What Louise and Eddy and Peter have said is much more like it. This isn't to say that autism spectrum conditions can't complicate relationships. But we could say the same things about many traits of personality and character that have nothing to do with autism. Few of us are perfect; people with autism just have a diagnosis.

Perhaps, as you'd expect, it depends on what we mean. One scenario: the artist used the profits from his musical career to underwrite drug dealing and prostitution. In that case, you're supporting drugs and pimping at least in the sense that you're helping to provide the cash that keeps it running. Another scenario: the artist isn't dealing drugs and pimping, but his fame and the reach of his CD sales helps him encourage others to do what he used to do. In that case, your money is still supporting criminal activities, though quite a bit less directly. I'm guessing the most likely scenario is this: far as you know, he isn't still carrying on any criminal enterprises. Far as you, he probably does mean to glorify those things, and far as you know, he probably does have at least some marginal success in encouraging others to do the things he used to do. In other words, even if he's no longer an active criminal, there's something unsavory here, and the more successful he is financially, the...

I think you've answered most of your own question. You pointed to self-defense and war as potential cases of acceptable killing. But the law in every country I know of allows for self-defense, and also allows for legislatures or rulers to declare war. We might add: for better or worse (worse , in my view) some countries allow for capital punishment. And so whether or not religion has anything to do with the historical origins of the law, there are very few nations, if any, in which killing is absolutely and always illegal. Still, we do place a very high value on life -- perhaps even a "supreme" value, even if not an absolute one. But it's not at all clear that we have to use religious premises to end up with this view, and it's also not clear that there's anything irrational in thinking that killing is usually a very great wrong. One might think: if this is irrational, we need some sort of argument to see why.