You ask: "morally speaking, can my action BE more serious or offensive only because other people see it so? Suppose there was someone weird enough to think that your sleeping man would be indifferent between having his feet used to prop a window open and being raped in his sleep. And to make things clearer, suppose this person thinks that the sleeping man wouldn't mind either. It's hard to imagine the psychology of such a person, and may not even be clear if he would be a competent moral agent, but set that aside. What should we say? Perhaps we would say that we shouldn't judge this person more harshly for doing one of these things rather than the other. No harm was meant; it's just that the person was massively, unimaginably clueless. This would be someone we should keep close watch over; if they actually carried out the rape, we would be fully justified in confining them in some way. We might abstain from moral judgments about the person himself, but there's another question we can ask: if the...

You offer two reasons (though really it's three.) The first is that if the government helps people (provides material support, in your phrase), it harms those people. Is this true? It's quite possibly true sometimes ,. But is it true by and large? You haven't offered any evidence, and I'm not convinced that there is any. In any case, when the government doesn't help people it's at least as plausible that at least some of the time, that results in harm. So even if both policies sometimes harm some people, that doesn't tell us which is worse. But there's another problem internal to your argument. You're in favor of various kinds of aid, so long as it's not provided by the government. Presumably you're in favor of that at least partly because you think it can actually do good. But if private charity can do good and help people, it's not obvious that having the help come from the government can't do likewise. Now there are questions here that philosophy alone can't answer: which kinds of aid...

The question of whether this sounds forced or not is a hard one to make a judgment about, but the answer, as I understand it, is pretty much the one you've heard. If one prays to a saint, one is asking the saint to intercede; not to perform the miracle. Although we might say loosely that a saint "performed a miracle," the saint has no powers over nature of his/her own and if a miracle occurs, the source of the miracle is God. This isn't to suggest that your question is a bad one. Why bother, one might ask, with this circuitous route? After all, God (assuming there is a God) hears the prayer, knows what the petitioner want, and grants the request or not—even if the petitioner addressed the request to a saint. Perhaps a panelist with a deeper understanding of Catholic tradition can chime in, but Catholicism has a genius for appealing to the religious imagination of its adherents. And since religion is at least as much a matter of the heart as of the mind, one can imagine an argument to the effect that...

There are two sorts of issues here. Let's start with the one that I think underlies your discomfort. The fact that something is my goal may matter to me, but that doesn't make it intrinsically valuable. Indeed, it might be intrinsically horrid. If someone's goal is to brutally torture an innocent child to death (writing those words actually makes me shudder, but that's part of the point) then their goal is the very opposite of intrinsically valuable, and the fact that they would value achieving it makes them evil without adding an iota of value to their "achievement." In a nutshell: the fact that I value something doesn't entail that what I value is valuable. Whether an "achievement" is valuable isn't a matter of whether someone values it, but of what the achievement itself amounts to. There might seem to be a utilitarian argument to the contrary: the pleasure the sadist gets from his cruelty adds to the sum total of happiness in the world. But all this really shows is that a certain version of...

You've given an apparently powerful reason for thinking that it's morally acceptable to have a military to defend the nation: lives will be saved. You've implicitly cast this in terms of defense. That is, you've implicitly offered a justification for having an army by appeal to the right of a nation to defend its citizens. It's plausible that having no military would lead to more deaths than having one. And it's morally plausible that people—and nations—have a right to self-defense. And so this raises an obvious question: what reasons are left for thinking that military service is immoral? There may be reasons. But you've shifted the burden onto yourself. If you want your view to be taken seriously, then you have to say more. If you leave the argument where it is, then you're open to the charge that you hold your position in bad faith. Are there reasons to the contrary? You could try to show that having armies leads in the long run to more deaths. Or you could try to argue that it's always wrong to...

I don't think theology is a subdiscipline of philosophy, but philosophy of religion is, so you should feel free to ask your question.

True: only sentient beings can think about moral questions, and so moral questions don't arise in a world with no sentient (or better, sapient) beings. Of course, in one sense of "arise," no questions arise unless there are creatures who can ponder the questions. Nonetheless, that doesn't make the way things are depend on the existence of thinking beings. There were electrons before we came on the scene, and there would be electrons even if neither we nor any creatures like us had existed. That said, you're right: moral matters have an intrinsic connection with beings who can ponder them. There are no live moral issues in a lifeless world, nor even in one with sentient but no sapient creatures. Moral truths are truths about how certain kinds of creature should behave if there were any. But this is consistent with there being moral truths even if nothing in the world knows those truths and even if none of the relevant kinds of creatures exist. Thus, one might say (I would) that before any thinking...

As you've described the case, there's something the inventor could do that would save lives. There's also a dispute about how to analyze the notion of a cause. Some would say (your friend apparently is in this camp) that absences—in the case, not doing something—can't be causes. Others disagree and provide accounts that allow absences to be causal. This is an abstract and complicated issue, but how much difference will it make to how we judge the inventor? Suppose I'm in a war zone and happen to know that there's an IED in a certain spot. I see someone running on a path that will take him over the IED and almost certainly leave him dead. Let's assume I even know who it is and know that in all relevant respects, he's an innocent. As it happens, I'm behind a barrier, but I could easily warn him. I don't. He runs over the IED and dies in the blast. Is there something I could have done that would have saved him? We've already said yes. Would it have come at any significant cost? We can stipulate for...

The reason you feel you don't understand the claim is because it's nonsense. I know that there are three pillows on the bed behind me, but no science was committed in finding that out. I just turned around, looked and counted. I know that I had dinner with friends yesterday. No scienceing there either. I just remember. I know that one of our neighbors recently quit a committee he'd been a member of. Once again, no science; someone in a position to know told me. In fact, it's safe to say that by far most of what we know we know without anyone doing science. Of course people doing science make observations, consult their memories and get information from other people. But so does everyone, and most of us are not scientists and don't do science. The fact that X has important things in common with Y doesn't make X a Y.

According to the internet, the sun rose at 6:02 this morning in Washington. I was awake and when I got around to opening the blinds I could see that the sky was blue. The sheets on the bed are blue too, though not the same blue. They're a few years old and I like the way they feel when I touch them. But the sun doesn't rise, does it? Although centuries ago, people thought it did, they were just wrong. And there isn't really a sky—no dome or roof or thing of any sort. There are sheets, but they're made of atoms, which aren't colored, nor are collections of them. And touching the sheets; don't get me started on that. Except… If someone says the sky is blue, they've said nothing false, nothing wrong. Same goes for telling you the color of their sheets; likewise for telling you they touched them. People may be mistaken about what being a blue sheet amounts to, or a blue sky, or about what's going on under the covers, so to speak, when we touch a sheet, or anything else. But that doesn't make the...