I wonder if you meant "impermissible" rather than "permissible", but either way I'll try to address the question. With respect to any ethical principle, at almost any level of abstraction, it's hard to say that it applies under literally any circumstance (maybe "do the right thing" is an exception, but it obviously doesn't help much). "Never torture innocent children" seems a pretty secure principle, yet it's not hard to devise a situation in which maybe one has to violate it - say the fate of millions of lives really depends on torturing this one child. (Leave aside how you can know that this is so, a real problem for alleged "ticking bomb" scenarios.) So I would say any kind of racial profiling is wrong because it violates certain basic rights, especially the right to be treated with dignity and to be treated fairly under the rule of law - which means that you have to have specifically done something to be singled out for negative treatment. But like all rights, this one too can be swamped by...

Your question reminds me of a quote that a friend uses as her email signature: "If I'm here to serve others, what are the others here for?" There is an important point here, and it's one that Rand is getting at, namely: an ethics of pure selflessness is, if perhaps not incoherent, at least ungrounded. It must be okay for people to enjoy certain benefits if it's morally worthy for others to work to secure those benefits for them. However, Rand then goes to the other extreme, endorsing instead an ethics of pure selfishness. One can readily acknowledge both the legitimacy of self-concern and the obligation to concern oneself with the welfare of others. There is no contradiction. So, for instance, on a utilitarian conception of justice, one gets to count one's own utility as fully as anyone else's. If helping another would involve a great sacrifice on one's own part, assuming the benefit to the other is not correspondingly greater, one is not obliged to make the sacrifice. But, it is still...

Since you said "literally anything", almost all philosophers would agree that the answer is "no, it doesn't follow from materialism". For one thing, there are facts about consciousness, memory, etc., that depend upon facts external to the body. So, for instance, whether I really remember an event is determined in part by whether or not it really occurred. But, if we leave aside these sorts of external facts - which is probably what you had in mind anyway - then there is a hot dispute in philosophy of mind over this very question. Some philosophers, like David Chalmers and Frank Jackson, have argued that if materialism is true then all the facts about consciousness, such as what it's like to have sensory experiences, should be in principle derivable from a complete physical description of the relevant person's body (or brain). Other philosophers, myself included, have argued that materialism, as a metaphysical thesis, is not committed to this consequence. The idea is that though mental states are...

I'm not sure what you mean by "intangible" here, but no matter. It strikes me that the question is based on assimilating the existence of a right to its observance. It may well be, and I believe it is, that rights are being violated all the time. I don't see how that is evidence that one doesn't have any rights, unless of course what one means by having rights is having them respected. But why think that? Now another question one might ask is, if there is such wholesale violation of rights, what good do they do me? Here I think the answer is, sometimes very little. Still, moral obligations, to which rights give rise, hold even if people by and large don't carry them out. Also, I think we do find many domains in which people making moral arguments does serve to change behavior for the better, and it's crucial to the cogency of such arguments that there really exist the rights and duties to which they appeal.

If you just reflect on your own experience you can see that the feeling that the pain is in your hand is not merely a matter of having learned over time that certain feelings are caused by damage in certain areas; on the contrary, your hand, as we say, "hurts". Infants clearly show recognition of the locations of pains in their bodies, and yet they certainly haven't had sufficient experience to learn the requisite correlations. Also, notice that sometimes we're wrong. This happens with tooth pain a lot. We feel the pain in one tooth but it's actually caused by damage in a different tooth. How would this mistake even occur if there weren't something inherent in the feeling itself concerning which tooth hurt? One fairly simple way to account for the localization of pains is this: The relevant nerves in the damaged area send signals to the pain centers of the brain, which represent both the damage and the location of the damage. The identities of the nerves from which the message emanated, or their...

First, I would take issue with the claim that war nowadays causes many fewer casualties. While this may be true for soldiers in the armed forces of modern industrial societies, it is clearly not so for the civilian population or even for the soldiers in "third world" nations. The Vietnam War is a good example of what I mean. But if I understand the question, I think "fair fight" is definitely not an ethical requirement, though fighting a "just war" is. To see what I mean by this distinction, consider the ethics of launching a surprise attack. Though in a clear sense this isn't "fighting fair", my view is that if the cause is just and it helps to win the war, of course do it. However, there are moral rules about how to conduct war, and, say, targeting civilians in order to reduce casualties among one's own soldiers is a violation of those rules. As long as one is fighting a just war, and conducting it justly, I don't see that the notion of fighting fair is relevant. After all, war is not a sport.

In some sense of course the nervous system is an extension of the brain, and precisely where one sets the boundary of the brain is somewhat arbitrary. However there is a point to distinguishing the function of the nerves in the hand that detect the damage in question - say, a cut - from the function of higher-level centers in the cortex that process the information and mediate responses (such as grabbing the hand, putting pressure on the cut, etc.). Rather than speak of "projection of the pain" by the brain, I would describe what's going on as the brain representing damage in the hand (that's the pain - it's represented as located in the hand) based upon the inputs received from the nerves in the hand. So long as the best explanation of cognitive and perceptual activity requires describing the mind/brain in terms of distinct faculties with distinct functions - and this is of course an empirical question, but I believe there is good reason to accept it - it would only undermine the explanatory project...

Lying involves an intentional act of deception. If someone truly believed that Iraq before the US invasion possessed WMD and asserted as much, this wouldn't be a case of lying. We all make claims from time to time that turn out to be false, but we are not (usually - see below) morally culpable. However, it's lying if one makes a false claim believing it to be false, or at least not believing it to be true. (Of course in some circumstances one might be morally culpable for one's ignorance, or for making a claim that has serious consequences without sufficient justification. So if someone in a position of authority went around claiming that Iraq had WMD without solid evidence, even if they believed it, they would be morally blameworthy. But that doesn't mean they were lying.)

First of all, the question of what grounds private ownership applies to all goods, not just land. So I'm going to treat the question as the more general one about how one can come to own anything. There are two basic approaches to this question: a "natural rights" approach and a "social institution" approach. On the former approach, people have rights to own goods in the same sense in which they have other basic rights, such a right not to have their bodily integrity violated by others. The question for such an approach is how one acquires a property right in any particular good, which amounts to the right to exclusive use of the good and a correlative duty on the part of others to not interfere with the owner's use of the good. The most common answer to this question derives from Locke, and it divides the question into two: how does an unowned good come to be owned by someone, and how can ownership of an already-owned good be rightfully transferred. The answer to the second question is fairly...

The question is rhetorically hyperbolic in a way that makes it hard to discern just what kind of answer you are looking for. For instance, of course we can "speak a cohesive sentence to express one unified thought"; all of us do it thousands of times per day. I grant however that human history is filled with horror, and that human beings are capable of great violence, evil, and in general a lack of empathy and sensitivity. On the other hand, there are many, many instances of selfless acts of great sacrifice out of love and duty. As for taking pride in our scientific, technological, and, yes, philosophical accomplishments, I don't see that our evident faults ought to prevent us from recognizing our evident accomplishments. Human minds are wonderful, awe-inspiring natural objects, and it seems to me that a combination of both pride and humility, in just the right proportion, is well warranted.