It may be true, though it may not be, that ethical questions only come up in relations with other people. (It may not be true, because many ethical views hold that we have duties to ourselves.) In any case, let's grant it. And having granted that, it may be true, though it may not be, that pursuing non-social passions lies outside the realm of the ethical. And from all that it may follow, though it may not, that private passions have no ethical value. Even if we grant the first assumption and the accompanying "maybe"s, it still doesn't follow that pursuing private passions is unethical. After all, if we start down that path, we'll end up arguing that sleeping is unethical, and if ever there was a silly ethical claim, that would be it. The most that would follow is that rock collecting and such have no ethical value; not that they're positively unethical. And since there's no reason to think ethical value is the only kind of value, this is hardly a devastating conclusion. But let's...

A lot to talk about here; I hope others will add their thoughts. A couple of asides. I'm puzzled that you say it's likely rape if a person is "blotto," to use your word. But I'm more puzzled by something else: you say "I don't think impaired judgment is a standard to go on" and yet you don't give any reason why not. Let that pass, however. I don't know if there's a sharp line that marks the difference between too drunk to consent and sober enough. More important, I don't see anything strange in the idea that the standard might not be the same for all cases. Karaoke is pretty low-stakes; getting married, for example, or signing a potentially costly contract (your example) is a different story. Your reply might be that you could accept that; the standard is higher the higher the stakes. But you go on to argue that the stakes are pretty low in the case of bad sexual "decisions." I'm guessing you'd say it's on the order of deciding to sing karaoke in a crowded room. Others disagree. For...

Hi John. Humans create lots of terms to help them talk about the world. But if you think about it, none of our terms have a meaning for creatures who aren't capable of language. The word "electron" doesn't have a meaning for your dog, but that doesn't tell us anything about the reality of electrons. But terms as such aren't the point. Outside of the human world, few if any earthly creatures have a concept of evil. But from that nothing follows about whether some things just are evil. Indeed: I'd be willing to say that wanton cruelty to animals is a clear example of evil, even though the animal doesn't have the conceptual wherewithal to see it that way. Your further idea seems to be a kind of relativism: what gets counted as "evil" is simply a matter of culture and upbringing. That's a familiar view but it's not as obviously correct as it might seem. For one thing, the fact that people in different groups disagree doesn't mean that there's no independent fact of the matter. For example:...

It's an interesting question; a fully adequate answer would take at least an essay, and one that I'm not qualified to write. That said, a few preliminary distinctions may be helpful. First, whether someone feels offended and whether the feeling is appropriate are different questions. I recall a meeting where someone took offense at the speaker's use of "she" in place of the generic "he." In the context, it was clear that the speaker wasn't being offensive and that the audience member's feeling of offense was idiosyncratic to say the least. So while there's a sense in which the speaker "offended" the listener, there was no wrong. For what follows, let's set aside the cases where someone feels offended without good reason and turn to a more central sort of case. Suppose someone calls out "Hey ____!" to get someone's attention, where the blank gets filled with a racial slur. The person on the receiving end may not feel offended, and may not take offense, but that might be, for instance, because he's...

You've raised several good questions, but I'd like to focus on just one of them. You offer serious moral reasons for being a vegetarian. And anyone who thinks that you're "forcing" your views on them because you argue for your views has a very strange idea of what "forcing" mean. But I wasn't entirely sure what just what sort of intolerance was at issue here. I assume the people you're arguing with don't want to require you to eat meat, so at least that degree of intolerance isn't at issue. Perhaps they think you're argument that the state should be able to require them to be vegetarians. I didn't take that to be your view, but if it were it would be odd to say that they're being intolerant by objecting to such a potential imposition on their behavior. That said, democratic societies routinely do stop people from acting on at least some sincerely-held moral beliefs. For example: someone might believe they shouldn't allow their children to have blood transfusions. Most democratic countries ...

On one version of the Categorical Imperative, we're told to act only on maxims (roughly, principles of action) that we could will to be universal laws. That may or may not be the right way to think about morality; I don't have a settled opinion. However, there are philosophers who think Kant had the theory right, but fell down in applying it. Kant thought that lying is always wrong; whether the Categorical Imperative requires this is less clear. The question is whether there's a way of formulating an acceptable maxim that allows for lying in some circumstances. Kant's argument to the contrary isn't entirely convincing, to say the least. The case of homosexuality is arguably a case in point -- or more accurately, the case of homosexual sex may be a case in point. Kant thought, far as I know, that homosexual acts are always wrong. But when someone who's homosexual by orientation acts on that orientation, it's pretty implausible that their maxim, universalized, requires that heterosexuals have...

There are lots of questions we can ask about this argument, but I'd suggest that trying to shoehorn the issues into specific named fallacies isn't as helpful as just looking for places where the argument raises questions.. (It's interesting that in my experience, at least, philosophers invoke the names of fallacies only slightly more often than the average educated person does.) That said, here are a couple of quick thoughts. The first sentence offers two broad reasons for being altruistic: because in the long run it benefits both society and yourself. Take the first bit: if someone didn't already think they should be altruistic, how persuasive would they find being told "You should be altruistic because it benefits society"? If you want to turn to fallacy lists, is this a case of begging the question? (Don't be too quick just to answer yes. Think about the ways in which wanting to benefit society and acting altruistically might differ.) Turning to the next reason, is it incoherent to think someone...

I agree with Andrew: the dog/pig distinction won't get us anywhere. And I might even be persuaded that we shouldn't eat animals at all. But there's a sliver of a distinction that may be worth noting. If a stranger asks me to drive him to the grocery store, I don't have any obligation to say yes. If my friend asks me (and if it's not a lot of trouble to do it) then it's not so clearly okay for me just to say no. If my daughter asks me, the obligation seems even stronger. Our relationships with people can make a difference to how we ought to treat them. We can and do have relationships with our companion animals. And those relationships could make a difference to how we should treat them. I have an obligation to feed my dog, for example, but not to feed yours. Now it may very well be that it's wrong to eat animals at all. But even if it's okay to eat animals in general, it doesn't simply follow that it's okay to eat my own pet and the fact that it's my pet is the reason why it doesn't follow....

The notion of moral relativism is problematic. Here's a simple version: a moral relativist is someone who believes that what's right and wrong depends on the group/society in which the question arises. On this view, slavery, for example, could be right in one society and wrong in another. The idea is that just as it makes no sense to ask if something is tall absolutely, so it makes no sense to ask if something is right or wrong absolutely. The moral relativist says that the standard is the moral views of the relevant social group. This raises a good many questions. What social facts determine what's right or wrong in a group? Are we confusing " believes to be right/wrong" with " is right/wrong?" It also has problems with the fact that moral critiques often come from within the societies in which the practices in question go on. There are various ways of formulating more sophisticated versions of relativism, and perhaps one of them avoids such difficulties. But your question is whether...

The answer to the question you begin with is easy enough: in general, no. No doubt there are exceptions. Spelling them out in a simple a rule would be difficult, but your case isn't a hard one. Feeding someone's false beliefs, especially for one's own advantage and with no regard for the other person's good is wrong. The reply that you aren't actually supporting her "delusions," as you would call them, but merely not undermining them wouldn't get you off the hook. What you describe is self-serving rather than kind or honest and reducing the question to queries about a duty to undelude ignores that. As with all such posts in this forum, I have no way of knowing if your question is sincere or if the situation you describe is real. But whatever the case may be, the larger point is that concrete moral situations seldom reduce to a single question, especially when they involve our concrete relationships with other people. Thinking in terms of "duties" is less useful than asking about the decent or the...