I have a little ego, so I'll offer a little answer. I agree completely: it's not necessary to have studied philosophy to be able to say sane, sensible things about abortion, love, education and so on. Indeed, it would be very bad news if being able to think well about those sorts of things called for specialized training in philosophy. And in fact, no one on this panel is an authority on what people ought to think about, say, capital punishment. The questions philosophers think about are, as it's sometimes put, essentially contested. It's in the nature of the strange business we're in that no one is an authority on the answers in the way that a physicist might be an authority about the answer to some scientific question. No one should accept the conclusions folks on this panel come to just because we're philosophers, and none of us would want anyone to do that. What philosophers are often good at, however, by skill, training and inclination, is sorting through the logical and conceptual details...

And... since I thoroughly agree with Peter's comments, I'll add that you can read some similar reflections by going to question 1950 .

You've raised an interesting question. The general approach you're suggesting sounds like a version of what's called "multi-attribute utility theory." Without going into detail, multi-attribute utility theory lets us make decisions even when different sorts of values are at stake. Acting in a certain way might carry a high risk of losing money, but a high likelihood of keeping a friend. Depending on my "trade-off weights" (roughly, how much I care about money vs. friendship), and depending on the possible results and their probabilities given various choices, the tools of multi-attribute utility theory might give me a way of picking a course of action. It seems at least plausible that we could reconstruct any rational way of making decisions within this framework, and so in principle, we might be able to represent the way we think about the case you've offered. But this is really just where all the hard questions start. The first problem is that different people will weight different values...

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...

I wasn't entirely sure how many issues were on the table here. Your first question seemed to be whether it's contradictory to say that one person has two minds. But as your question continued, the issue seemed to be whether it's possible in general for there to be more than one mind. There's no obvious reason to think there couldn't be many separate minds, and of course what we usually assume is that there are. Whether solipsism is coherent is something that some people have doubted, but I've never found the doubts very convincing. So the question we'll tackle is whether you or I might have more than one mind or self. Interestingly enough, there are serious reasons for saying that the answer is yes. There are two bits here. One has to do with the brain. It has two hemispheres, and in patients with severe epilepsy, sometimes the only way to relieve the symtoms is to sever the corpus callosum -- the bundle of nerves that connects the two sides. Although there is room to argue about the details,...

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...

Couldn't agree more. I can imagine what it would be like to feel that I was observing my body from some detached perspective. And I can certainly imagine what it would be like to have the sense that I'm aware of various things "passing through my mind" without identifying with them. But even if it somehow seemed to me that I was actually outside my mind observing it (whatever that's supposed to mean), it is a very long step from there to conclusions about what I am, or what my mind is, and how the mind or the self fits into the rest of reality. I'd add: the experiences on offer here are interesting. But anyone who simply offers the conclusions you've described as the only reasonable way to interpret them doesn't seem to me to be doing what philosophy does. There is a large boatload of objections to the conclusion being drawn, and what someone doing philosophy would do is examine the conclusion in light of those objections. It's also worth noting that the meditative traditions don't...

Hi Keith. A perfectly good question. The short answer is that any such assumption is, to put it mildly, controversial. There are respectable ways of thinking about quantum theory that look at it in more or less the way you suggest. Those ways, however, come at a price: they require us to assume that there are influences on the particile that propogate faster than light. They also go beyond what the theory itself has to say, and add some extra physical/interpretive machinery. That's not a criticism of such views; it's just a remark. Quantum theory, alas, is a topic that leaves us in a peculiar lurch. As physics, it's fantastically well-confirmed and scientists and engineers make use of it in a vast number of ways that give us things like cell phones, laptop computers, MRI machines and a good deal else. But there are weird things about the math of the theory (I'll spare you any equations) that make it quite different from "classical" theories in ways that are still enormously controversial. Just to...

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? ...