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...

It's a nice question, and one that' s been discussed before in various versions. You've put particular emphasis on the idea that without negative emotions, we couldn't really be happy. Let's suppose you're right. As your own way of putting things suggests, it doesn't follow that there couldn't be such a thing as eternal happiness. The reason is that the kind of happiness that's at issue isn't best thought of as an emotion or mood but as some more global feature of our lives. In fact, your own point is that negative states can be part of, well, our happiness . We could also spend a bit of time on whether "negative states" that we enjoy (the frisson of "horror" we pay good money for at the movies, for example) really are negative states. But let that pass. I think the partisan of eternal life would probably object to being tied to the word "happiness." Some talk, for example, of "eternal bliss." But whatever state that's meant to pick out, it may not be quite the same as the one we...

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...

Suppose I happen to get great pleasure from something that more or less no one else cares about. Maybe I really enjoy writing poems that avoid using the letter "p." I know that there's no cosmic importance to poems of this sort, and I know that it's just a quirk of my psychology that I enjoy writing them so much. This activity has no "objective" value if that means value from some point of view that doesn't take me into account. But it still has value for me , and as long as I don't spend all my time doing it, there's nothing irrational about my using this odd little hobby as a pleasant pastime. I don't need to be worried about the fact that in the larger scheme of things, "p"-less poems don't count. The point is more or less obvious, I hope: if I dont' need to be bothered by the fact that some things have value for me alone, artists don't need to be bothered by the fact that some things have value only for a wider circle of creatures: creatures with the sorts of cognitive and perceptual...

Perhaps we need to ask a prior question: why would we make such a challenge? And living in a country where large numbers of people are suspicious of evolution and think that people who worry about global warming or nutty or part of a conspiracy, I'm not so sure that society really is "science worshiping." If you want to know the truth about the natural world, science is your best bet. That's because "science" isn't a secret cabal, but most importantly it's a set of intellectual methods that let us explore the empirical world systematically, weed out unpromising hypotheses, and gauge the strength of likely explanations. Does acupuncture work for back pain? The answer may well be yes. But anecdotes aren't enough to make the case. We need the kind of systematic techniques that we call science. At the other end of the spectrum, how many dimensions does space-time have? We may never know for sure. But it's a safe bet that our best answer will come from science. And on it goes. If rationalism ...

Perhaps the fact that I find this whole line of thought a little befuddling means that I shouldn't be answering the question. But maybe if I explain my confusion, that will help. Start with something simple. I might be curious about, say, some abstruse mathematical claim. And so I go to my mathematician friend and I say "Is it true that such-and-such?", where "such-and-such" is the mathematical conjecture I'm interested in. It would be pretty odd, wouldn't it, if my mathematician friend waxed "philosophical" about whether knowing the answer would change my behavior. In one way, of course, it would: I'd stop asking the question if I knew the answer. But in most other ways, life would go on as before. And yet, I still want to know whether such-and-such is really true. The point is that there really are two issues here, and it seems like confusion to mix them up. One is the matter of whether what I'm curious about is so; the other is the matter of what I'd do if it were -- or weren't. Now the two...

If I have it right, your brother thinks he won't change much, because he thinks that people in general don't change much from teen years to adulthood. He then goes on to draw a conclusion: children (or at least, teenagers) aren't really any different from adults. So we have two questions. First, is the premise true? Is your brother really right when he says that people who have reached the ripe old age of 13 are pretty much as they will be as adults? That's not a philosopher's question as such, though I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say that many people change a good deal after they get past their teen years. But there's another question: even if we granted your brother his premise, what about his conclusion? It would depend, wouldn't it? It may be that people's basic personality (cheerful or prickly or inclined to fuss-budgetry...) is set by the time they reach their teen years. And it's pretty plausible that mannerisms are laid down early. But I'm guessing your brother thinks his...

First, we need to set an issue aside. The word "induction" is sometimes used to refer to a certain sort of mathematical argument in which we prove something for every case by showing it for a "base" case and then showing that if it holds in the first n cases, it holds in the n+1th case. But it's pretty clear that your question is about induction as a matter of reasoning empirically from a limited set of instances to a claim about all cases, and so we'll use the word "inductive" in that way below. Here's an example of a necessary truth: every star that has planets orbiting around it is a star . Notice that it's universal; it says something about every star with planets. And if it were like "every star with planets orbiting around it is at least 3 billion years old," we could only show that it was true (assuming it is) by empirical means and thus, in a loose sense, inductively. (What we'd actually do is produce an argument from various theoretical and observational premises, but...

I have a feeling I'm missing your point, but I suspect Rawls would have said that what determines social status is complicated. I doubt he'd describe it as "fate" since it seems pretty clearly to be a combination of things: accidents of birth (the social status of one's family), partly, one assumes, one's abilities, , and all this against the background of the social arrangements of the particular society. In any case, the people behind the veil of ignorance don't know their social status, but not because this is or isn't a matter of "fate." It's because if they did, it would presumably make a difference to the social arrangement they favored, and that misses the point of the veil.

If by "compelling" you mean something like "beyond reasonable doubt," then the answer is almost certainly no. But that hardly makes arguments about God's existence unique. The claim that God exists has at least this in common with philosophical claims in general: there's plenty of room to argue both sides. On the other hand, if the question is whether there might be arguments for believing in God that some people might find convincing without lapsing into irrationality, then the answer is almost certainly yes. But once again, that hardly makes claims about God's existence unique. Pick more or less anything that philosophers disagree about. You'll find that some sane philosophers are convinced by arguments that others don't find persuasive. Can someone reasonably find an argument persuasive even if they realize that there are unanswered objections to it? If the standard of reasonableness is one that humans can meet, the answer is also yes. One reason is that there are two ways to think of...