Yes. Of course, I only think that because I think personal identity depends on continuity of memory and character traits, and I think memory and character traits are constituted by brain states. So, if you could somehow alter my brain enough to wipe out my memories (perhaps replacing them with some artificial set of memories) and change my character traits, you will have killed me. And if you did it knowingly and purposely, you have committed murder (i.e., the intentional killing of a person). But... 1. I'm not sure how our legal system would deal with it. I suspect there's something in our murder statutes that requires a dead body for a murder charge. We'd have to get our laws up to date with our science (and philosophy!). 2. Now, I've opened the door to some slippery slopes (or sorites arguments). How much of my identity does an evil neuroscientist have to mess up before he kills me. If he deletes 50% of my memories and changes half my character traits, has he killed me (killed half of...

I think the principle of charity is useful for at least two reasons. First, if you are objecting to an argument and you present it as strongly as possible, no one (including the author of the target argument) can complain that you have attacked a straw man. If you defeat the strongest version of the argument, presumably you've wiped out any weaker versions with it. Second, if you're able to develop an even stronger version of the argument than the author herself, you have made progress, especially if you are then able to raise objections to that stronger version. I tell my students that their goal in writing philosophy papers is to take the debate up the staircase towards Truth (or towards the best " normative " answer to a difficult question), and the way to do that is start with some position in the debate and the argument for it, present it as strongly as possible (using principle of charity), develop an objection to it, and then develop a response to the objection (principle of charity...

This is a great question and one that is becoming increasingly important as neuroscientists and psychologists increasingly suggest that their research is showing that free will is an illusion, a claim I call 'willusionism', and as increasing evidence comes in that shows that these willusionist claims, which the media loves to report and exaggerate, can have (at least short-term) negative effects on people's behavior. I have lots to say on this topic, some of which I say in papers on my website if you want to hear more, but here's a brief take on the issues. Suppose you believe that free will requires the abilities to make choices based on conscious deliberation and reasoning and to control your actions in light of these choices (against internal desires to do otherwise and without external contraints preventing your action). Free will requires that your conscious self can make a difference in what happens. You may also happen to believe that the only way to have such free will is to have a non...

Perhaps Martin Luther King, Jr. did not mean this quotation quite as literally as you seem to be taking it. He seems to mean that we should take a more encompassing vision of what counts as justice and what our obligations are. So, it is unlikely that oppression in Turkmenistan has "a substantial impact" on the rights of people in Canada. But that does not mean that people in Canada shouldn't care about what is happening in Turkmenistan or vice versa, and if they are able to do anything about it, they should. And until justice is achieved everywhere, complete justice is not achieved. King was responding in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail to Southern ministers and others he called 'moderates' because they argued that he should not be in Birmingham trying to change the segregation laws there (in what they thought were 'radical' ways). He argued that his view of justice, inspired by people like Jesus, demands that he do what he can to prevent injustice outside of his city or state (or...

Yes, at least assuming that the "other woman" knows, or should know, that the man is married. The wife has grounds, in the sense of appropriate reason, to be angry because anger is an appropriate emotional response to having an important relationship messed up (not to mention other things, such as parenting help, financial help, etc.), and appropriate targets of that anger include persons who knowingly did things to mess up that relationship (hence the wife also has at least as much grounds to be angry at her husband). I am assuming here that it is sometimes appropriate to feel anger, an assumption that might be questioned by some (e.g., Buddhists?). Whether the wife has grounds, in the sense of moral justification, to be angry at the other woman is a more complicated question, since it is not clear what it means to be morally justified to feel an emotion towards someone (and also because the facts of the case might make such justification unclear).

I think the logic is fine, but I'm not sure about the content of the argument. The argument structure is: 1. X is an institution with an essential goal that is clearly immoral. 2. It is wrong for individuals and institutions not to do what they can to prevent an institution from achieving immoral goals. 3. So, it is wrong for individuals and institutions not to do what they can to prevent X from achieving its immoral goals. If we fill in Nazism for X and wiping out Jews for their essential immoral goal, the valid argument also looks sound (i.e., the premises and therefore the conclusion are true). But if we fill in Christianity for X, that argument is less clearly sound, mainly because Christianity is a much more diverse institution than Nazism with more varied essential goals. Some Christians take their religion to require fighting against homophobic practices, just as some fought against slavery and racism, while other Christians take it as an essential implication...

The answer will depend on what your reasons are for not eating meat. For instance, I do not believe that eating meat is wrong because killing animals is wrong. Rather, I believe it is wrong to cause suffering to those animals we have good reason to believe can feel pain and suffer (unless we are justified in believing that the suffering will relieve more suffering, as is the case with some animal experimentation but is almost never the case with eating animals). So, I try to do what I can to avoid supporting factory farming, which is a manifest case of causing unnecessary suffering. I am not as good as I should be about this commitment. For instance, if I am in a situation where I have to choose between eating factory-farmed meat and not eating (or having to go to great lengths to eat), I tend to eat the meat. If I am served meat and the only way to avoid eating it is to throw it away, I will eat the meat (otherwise, one might even think the animal's pain was even more useless than it otherwise...

There is not a prevailing consensus on the questions of (1) whether free will is compatible with determinism and (2) whether humans have free will. However, I would estimate that close to 2/3 of professional philosophers are compatibilists about free will and determinism (they think determinism poses no threat to free will), with the other 1/3 roughly split between libertarians (who are incompatiblists who believe that we have free will, and hence that determinism is false) and hard incompatiblists or skeptics about free will (who are incompatiblists who believe that we do not have free will because determinism is true and/or indeterminism would not help secure free will). These estimates are based on a large-scale survey I conducted (along with Thomas Nadelhoffer) and on another large-scale survey conducted by David Chalmers and David Bourget (see here ; lots of other interesting results too). These survey results may be slightly off for various reasons (e.g., for these...

Peter Smith's advice is dead on. The only thing I would add is that, while you are looking through the Stanford Encyclopedia and Phil Index and PhilPapers (which is a great resource), you look for recent articles whose titles or abstracts suggest that they provide an overview of the debate (e.g., "Recent Work on X"), and then you use the references in those articles to guide you towards other sources. Reading such articles often provides information about which sources will be most useful to you, given your interest in the debate. And don't forget to read the classic works (e.g., most cited) in the history of the debate as well. Finally, you will make your future self much happier if you keep your sources well-organized (in electronic or real-world files) and if you jot down a few sentences about each article--its main point and how it might be relevant (or not) to your project. My current self is unhappy with my past selves for not being diligent enough about such record-keeping!

To offer an opposing view to Professor Leaman's (and nothing particularly philosophical): there is some evidence that circumcision reduces the risk of contracting certain STDs, such as herpes and HIV. Though there is disagreement about this evidence, if it is substantiated, then this benefit of circumcision might outweigh the reasons one might take it to be cruel. By analogy, we vaccinate our children because of the health benefits despite the fact that it causes them pain (and in my experience, they tend not to consent to the shots, even after they are old enough to provide something like consent!). From my experience observing circumcision performed and discussing it with my OB/GYN friends who perform many of them, I'm also not sure it causes that much pain to the newborn, though it is very difficult to know, and not just for philosophical reasons having to do with the problem of other minds. Finally, I suspect some boys may be unhappy if they (well, a certain part of them) don't look like...