Let's leave mental health aside for the moment and ask: would it make sense to imagine a situation in which a solid majority of people were physically ill? The answer seems pretty clearly to be yes. For example: we can imagine a pandemic flu infecting a majority of all humanity. Or for that matter, we can imagine a majority of people having some chronic disease like asthma. Physical health isn't a purely statistical concept. Without pretending to put together a fully satisfactory definition, we can presumably agree that whether someone is physically healthy has to do with their functioning. Statistics may have something to do with this (after all, we use statistical techniques in trying to sort out what it's reasonable to expect from a human body), but there's no simple equation between "physically healthy" and "near the statistical average." We can also add: people with, for example, above average lung capacity aren't thereby considered ill, while people with lung capacity well below average ...

It may well be that there's an evolutionary story to be told about how we come to adopt moral codes and so on. But your question, as I'm reading it, is whether this undermines the objectivity of morality -- leads to the conclusion that our moral views are neither correct nor incorrect, or something like that. In fact, the two issues seem quite distinct. Compare: No doubt our ability to sort things by shape evolved and helps us survive. But that doesn't mean things don't really have shapes, nor that our beliefs about shapes are somehow flawed or empty or merely a "refined survival technique." There's a third strand to be separated out here. If there is such a thing as objective morality, what makes it objective isn't the fact that it's to be found in some scripture or other. On the one hand, none of us needs scripture to be convinced that wanton cruelty is wrong. And on the other hand, some things called for in some scriptures don't seem right on reflection at all. To sum up, what evolution...

You could have your own personal code that you didn't expect others to follow. And there's even a familiar sense of the words "ethics" and "ethical" that would let us call this your "code of ethics." No problem there. But there's also a perfectly good sense of the words "ethics" and "ethical," and of related words like "moral" that says there is something else. On the view that these uses of the words aim to capture, there are some things that are wrong whether or not they happen to be part of your private code of ethics. Anyone who thinks that there are such things will say that ethical principles in this sense just are universal. You might think that there are no such principles, or that no one can show that there are, or that people who insist on them are preachy, or arrogant or confused. And perhaps that's the correct view. But perhaps it's not. Perhaps torturing unwilling victims for your own pleasure is just wrong, period . Perhaps using other people as means to your own...

Not having the details of Sullivan's view ready to hand, all I can offer are some general comments on homosexuality, Kant and utilitarianism. On Kant, you might want to have a look at the replies to question 1681 , and if you can get a copy, at Alan Soble's paper "Kant and Sexual Perversion," cited in his answer to that question. Prof. Soble makes a strong case that Kant's views on homosexuality are little more than sophisticated gay-bashing. The most relevant Kantian thought might seem to be that we should never treat anyone -- ourselves included -- merely as a means and not also as an end. In Kant's view, any sort of sex outside marriage falls short on this score, including masturbation. (Kant seems to have been particularly hung up about solitary sex.) This means that arguments against homosexuality based on Kant's views are likely to prove more than their proponent may have had in mind. In any case, it's hard to credit the view that non-marital sex always amounts to nothing more than...

We might start by pointing out that there's a controversy about just what rights are and also about whether animals have rights, but let's try to finesse those issues. On one common way of understanding rights, for me to have a right is for people or institutions to be obliged to treat me in a certain way. Whether that's the whole story, it's plausibly at least part of it. But cats, dogs and so on aren't obliged to act in any way; creatures who aren't capable of understanding obligations can't have any obligations. If we put these two bits together, we get a plausible answer to your question: if there were no humans, then there wouldn't be anyone who had any obligations. (Of course, if there are non-humans who have the right kinds of minds, the story is different.) If there aren't any creatures who could have obligations, then the animals don't have rights. We can back off this a bit. Let's use the term moral agent for any creature who is of the sort that can have moral obligations. Then...

Some systems of rules and codes of conduct are arbitrary. In Canadian football, it's 3 downs; in the USA it's 4. There's no question of which is really right, and if the CFL or the NFL decided to change its rules, no one could object that the proposed new rules were wrong. Likewise, a fraternity might have a secret handshake, and members of the fraternity might make it a rule to greet one another that way. But they could do away with the rule or change the handshake and once again, no one could say that they had somehow gotten things objectively wrong. It's part of the way that we use moral terms, however, that when we make a moral claim, we intend the claim to be universal. It's part of the concept of morality that something could be part ofsomeone's "moral code" or "system of morality" and yet be morallywrong. If someone says "It's wrong to keep slaves" they mean that it's wrong whether or not the slaveholder agrees, and whether or not the particular group or culture that may be at issue has a ...

A nice question. The thought is something this: there might be creatures out there who are as intellectually advanced when compared to us as we are when compared to, say, three-toed sloths. If it would be wrong for those creatures to exploit us in various ways, doesn't this at least raise the question of whether it's acceptable for us to put sloths in zoos? Or conversely, if our superiority to the sloths makes it okay to put them in zoos, mightn't a race of super-intelligent aliens be justified in putting us on display or "serving" us for dinner? I'm not going to offer an opinion on whether it's wrong to enzoo the sloths, though I think that the answer depends at least partly on whether they're able to thrive in that sort of setting. But there is a point that seems to me worth raising: mere comparitive superiority may not be the issue. There may be a difference between us and the sloths that puts us in a different moral category. At least some philosophers (Kant being the most notable) think that...

Although the issues aren't exactly the same, you might want to take a look at Peter Smith's answer to question 2012 . The fact that someone doesn't know they are being mocked or deceived doesn't imply that they aren't harmed. True, if they never find out, then their feelings may not be hurt (though see what follows), but many people -- I'm one -- find the thought of a life in which they are blissfully ignorant of how badly people think of then quite a bit less desirable than one in which they know what people really think. Now of course, it's not an all or none affair. Human nature being what it is, my profession being what it is, and having a certain sense of my own quirks, I'm reasonably confident that some people make fun of me behind my back. (I would hardly be the first teacher in that position.) This doesn't bother me, since I'm non-neurotic enough not to think that most people look at me that way. In particular, I think I have a reasonable idea (no doubt not completely accurate) ...

I think there may be two rather different questions here. The first is the general one that you begin with: what good is an apology? The second is whether in a particular case -- the apology by the Australian government in your example -- the apology might be simply a sop to the conscience. I can't pretend to answer the more particular question since I know so little about the details of the case, but what of the larger issue? Apologies by themselves may not be enough; there are plenty of cases where much more than an apology is called for. But for most of us, the practice makes sense from the inside. Suppose I have said something hurtful to you that was entirely uncalled for. Then I've wronged you. At the least, I may have made you feel bad for no good reason. I may also have made you look bad in front of others. I've put the moral relationship between us out of whack. When I apologize, I acknowledge that what I did was wrong, and in doing so, I go at least some distance toward restoring the moral...

There are two sorts of questions here, I think. The first is the one you're actually asking: does the trick with the barista count as cheating – as a violation of the rules that define the game – and not just as doing something wrong? The second question is what settles questions like this. On the first question, the cases you agree on suggest this: tampering is out by the rules of this game, but misleading your opponent about your own progress, etc. is okay. And if direct tampering is out, it's hard to see why getting someone to do the dirty work would be in. That means it would be cheating to hire someone to rig the scales, and it would be cheating to pay someone to lace the coffee in your opponent's thermos -- coffee you can assume he planned to drink anyway. But the case you describe is a matter of tricking him into doing something he might not otherwise have done and might decide not to do exactly because he knows that fibbing is part of the game. So what's the right answer? Is it cheating? ...