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Ethics

There are certain kinds of moral belief that we view in a pluralistic manner, and others that we take to be absolute. For an example of the former, suppose that I'm a vegetarian who believes that eating meat is immoral. Most people would say that it's inappropriate for me to harangue meat eaters, since they are just as entitled to their beliefs about diet as I am to mine. By contrast, we don't reason this way about things like murder. I am not obligated to respect the beliefs of someone who thinks murder is permissible--on the contrary, I may be morally remiss if I don't try to stop or correct him. What explains the difference between these two kinds of moral belief?

It's an interesting question. Some thoughts. Suppose Rufus believes that murder is morally acceptable. If I know of a murder he's trying to commit, then most of us agree that I'm not just allowed but even obliged to do various things to prevent it. (Telling the police would be the most obvious.) But if I have no reason to think that Rufus is planning to kill anyone, then while it's perfectly okay for me to try to argue him out of his view, most of us don't think it's okay to harass and harangue him about this admittedly despicable view. One reason for this is a matter of keeping civil peace; more on that below. Of course, there may be gradations here. Suppose it's not just that Rufus thinks it's okay to commit murder; suppose he makes a career of trying to convince other people. We'd still think there are limits to how far we can go in protesting, objecting and so on, but the limits would be fewer than they'd be if he were just some random weirdo who wasn't likely to act on his views and also wasn't...
Ethics

Is it worse to break a promise in order to avoid telling a lie, or to tell a lie in order to keep a promise?

There's no all-purpose answer. Breaking some promises is worse than breaking others. Telling some lies is worse than telling others. But there's no good reason to think that every broken promise is worse than any lie or vice-versa. Telling some lies is worse than breaking some promises; breaking some promises is worse than telling some lies. If you really have to choose, the least bad choice will depend on the details.
Ethics

People always say that one's action should not be aimed at disabling others to take their own actions, and the former is often subject of general denouncement. For example, when a pianist plays piano in his neighborhood at midnight and disturbs another person's sleep, people would say that playing piano is more of a disturbance than sleeping, and so one should avoid playing piano when someone else is sleeping. What is the intrinsic difference between the two? Cannot I say that the sleeping makes it inconvenient for the pianist to play piano, and so one should not sleep when someone else is playing piano? What is the logical basis of making any of such judgements?

There's no purely intrinsic reason, but there's still a reason overall. Here's a comparison. In the US, it's not just illegal but also wrong to drive on the left side of the road. In South Africa, the opposite is true. What makes it wrong to drive on the left in the US and the right in South Africa is that there is a widely-accepted practice --- in fact, a rule in this case --- about how we drive, and violating this particular practice puts others at risk. Now in the case of the late-night piano-player, there may be no literal risk created by the disturbance the piano player creates. But there's still what's sometimes called a coordination problem here, and there's a way of getting on that solves the problem. Most people sleep at night. Most people also need a reasonably quiet environment to sleep. And so we have a combination of custom and, in many jurisdictions, law to make it possible for people to do things like practice the piano and for people to sleep. Since most humans are wired to sleep at...
Ethics

Do we have moral duties towards institutions (like the Red Cross)? Do institutions have moral rights?

I often find the words "duty" and "rights" confusing outside of legal contexts, because they're weighted with theoretical overtones that don't always help us think clearly about how we should act and what we should do. So let me refocus the question: are the things we should and should't do when it comes to institutions? I think the answer is yes. Suppose that I find a way to hack into the Red Cross bank accounts and steal money. I shouldn't do that. It's not just that it's against the law (though it certainly is). It's just wrong. It's not wrong just because it may hurt the CEO of the Red Cross, or any of the people who work for the Red Cross. Those people come and go, and it may even be that they aren't actually harmed by my act of theft. What I'm doing is wrong because (dare I say?) it harms the Red Cross itself. We could provide lots of related examples. And when it comes to the fundamental question, that's a pretty good way to answer it, I think. We can do things that help or harm organizations...
Ethics

Dear philosophers, I've been told that instead of looking for objective moral facts, many philosophers see the task of ethics as bringing intuitions into "reflective equilibrium". But if intuitions aren't a sort of sixth sense that allows people to perceive moral facts, and are merely behavioural tendencies from nature and nurture, why ought we try to systematise them? What special authority do they have, and why duree action viagra should we care about them?

I think there may some some false dichotomies afoot here. Most of us think there are some first-order moral facts. For example: I may think (I do, actually) that torturing people just for fun is wrong. However, if I'm doing moral philosophy, I'm not trying to assemble a collection of first-order moral truths. I'm trying to present an account of (for instance) what makes things right or wrong. And so I offer some general view—for example, some version of utilitarianism, perhaps. But how do we decide whether my theory is correct? What counts as evidence? One important piece of evidence is whether my theory can account for uncontroversial cases. I think it's pretty uncontroversial that torturing people for fun is wrong. If my theory didn't entail this, that would be a serious piece of evidence against it. (Compare: if a scientific theory fails to account for some apparently unproblematic piece of experimental evidence, that's a strike against the theory.) Part of the process of arriving at reflective...
Ethics

People often die in car accidents due to their own negligence or incompetence. For example, a cyclist may be fatally struck by a car as a result of failing to stop at a red light. In cases like this, I have often seen observers express the following sentiment: "The cyclist should be denounced. He was the one at fault, and because of his failure the driver must live with the burden of having killed someone. If anything, it was the driver who was wronged by the cyclist, even though the former killed the latter." This seems to me puzzling attitude, and I was wondering if the panel had anything to say about it.

An interesting case! My reaction is that the attitude you describe isn't incoherent or confused, but isn't noble or wise either. Just to review: in the case you've described, the cyclist is negligent, ends up dead because of that, and someone (the driver) who did nothing wrong becomes the unwitting instrument of the person's death. If the driver had happened along a second earlier, she might have been able to swerve and avoid hitting the cyclist. If a police officer had been there, the cyclist might well have gotten a ticket. We hold people responsible for being negligent, and depending on the consequences of their negligence, the responsibility might be extensive. And so it's not confused to say that the cyclist is to be blamed if anyone is. It's also not confused to say that in addition to his own death, the cyclist's negligence had the effect of leaving an otherwise innocent person with a tremendous psychological burden. But what do we do with all those thoughts? If the driver was distraught,...
Animals
Ethics

When a human kills an animal for food, the human does not pay for the crime of killing that animal. But when a human kills another human; there is are arrests, forensic investigations, court drama, imprisonment, and even death penalty. What makes mankind so important and animals so disposable? Why are animals denied from justice? Why does a human feels the need to bleed an animal for food when he/she can survive on plants? For the religious lot: In the eyes of God, all beings are equals. He loves each one of them equally. So by this logic, he cherishes each life equally. For God, a human who has killed seven innocent humans is as guilty as a human child who has killed seven birds for thrill. Then why are crimes against animals not the same as crimes against humans?

It's perfectly reasonable to ask moral questions about killing animals. It's not a trivial issue. But it's also perfectly reasonable to ask whether all animals are morally equal. You say that in the eyes of God, all being are equal. But even taking it as given that there's a God, I don't see much reason to believe that. And in any case, trying to sort out what God might think about things is a slippery route to moral conclusions. What matters isn't what God's conclusions might be; what matters are the reasons. In many cultures, it's common to eat insects—ants, for example. Do we really think that killing an ant and killing a human being are morally on the same level? It's not obvious that they are. Ants are alive; there's no doubt of that. But so are bacteria. So are lettuce plants. We don't think that it's wrong to kill something simply because it's alive, and so among living things there must be distinctions—features of the living beings that make it more or less wrong, or even not wrong at all...
Ethics
Emotion

Are feelings/emotions susceptible to moral judgment? For example, can a person be blamed for merely feeling in a certain way, without acting on it?

It's an interesting question. If an emotion simply wells up in you, it might not be reasonable to blame you—especially if you don't act on it. In any given moment, we may not have much control over what we feel. But here are two things to consider. First, we do sometimes say that certain reactions aren't appropriate; we do use broadly moral language to talk about emotions. When we say things like "He should get over himself!", we're often making a judgment about the moral appropriateness of staying in the grip of an inappropriate emotional reaction. Second, most of us do have at least some ability, over the long haul, to train and reshape our emotions. This is one of the goals of certain kinds of psychotherapy, but therapy isn't the only path to the goal. This suggests that we can hold people (including ourselves!) responsible for not doing what it takes to modulate their habitual emotional responses. Here's another way to put it. It's part of a person's character that s/he reacts to things in...
Ethics

Pre-reflexively, I find myself of the intuition that many matters in life simply fall outside the scope of moral concern, even if we can subject them to moral reasoning. For example, there doesn't seem to be any moral question to be had about the simple act of buying a cup of coffee in the morning, even if that money spent could've been donated to charity instead. On reflection of the particulars, some moral considerations might come to bear on that purchase or on a habit of purchases, but, ceteris paribus, morality just doesn't seem to bear on the mere act of buying coffee. Even describing the act as "morally permissible" sounds a little strange, as if permission were needed in the first place. Moral reasoning seems simply out of place here. My sense is that while some normative ethical theories (e.g., Kantianism) are relatively hospitable to this intuition, utilitarianism cannot be, at least in its traditional forms. After all, the utilitarian calculus can easily be applied to just about any human...

You ask an excellent question and I'm sympathetic to your point. Since this isn't my field, I don't have much to offer by way of readings, but there's a paper from some years ago by my former colleague Susan Wolf that might be at least somewhat relevant. It's called "Moral Saints." It's in The Journal of Philosophy vol. 79 no. 8, August 1982, pp. 419--439. Her worry is not the same as yours, but it's closely related.
Animals
Ethics

Are people who are vegan, and also make their pets vegan( by giving them vegan anima food) doing something ethically correct since their pets can't really decide if they want to be vegan or not, and it's against their natural behavior to be vegan?

Pets already can't decide whether whether they want to eat kibble, whether they want to be walked on a leash, whether they want to stay indoors most of the day, whether they want to hold their water in until their owners get home, whether they want to be spayed or neutered, nor, for that matter, whether they want to be pets at all. Pets are different in a lot of ways from their undomesticated counterparts. If interfering with their "natural behavior" is wrong, then keeping pets at all is already a problem. So long as the vegan pet food is nutritionally adequate and doesn't cause the animal any distress, it's hard to see why it would be more wrong (if wrong at all) than any of the other things we've mentioned.

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