Maybe a golden rule helps: one should intervene to the extent that, if it was you who had the crazy ideas, you would want to be challenged? In general I suggest that philosophers (and here I do not mean professionals, I mean those who are committed to the love of wisdom -the literal definition of philosophy- and who seek to be informed by and practice philosophy in the great philosophical traditions from Socrates and Confucius to the present) can have an important role in social settings of enhancing the free exchange of ideas in which persons can be open to reason, objections, and responses. There is a time and place for this sort of thing --Looking back, I feel a little regret that the night before I got married I got drawn into a lengthy philosophical debate about why I think theism is reasonable and a good friend did not. But in general, many people think of arguments as what might be called "quarrels" in which no one is really interested in open minds and objections. So, I suggest that...

Good question. Someone who is a consequentialist --that is, a person who believes the morality of an act is contingent on its actual or expected consequences such as the act's producing great happiness or unhappiness-- might have to answer "yes." This is because there are probably cases (or there could be hypothetical cases) when an act of terrorism will produce some greater good or avoid some otherwise inevitable horror and there is no other act available to the parties involved. It is this implication of consequentialism that compels some of us to reject it. Some of us think there are what might be called absolute evils, evil that is so awful that one must not perform the evil no matter what ("even if the heavens fall" or something like that, is an expression sometimes used here). I believe Gandhi once observed that if he had to choose between two evils, he would choose neither (in other words, he would challenge the premise that he "had to choose"). Those of us who think there are some wrongs...

I will try to resist this reply: that depends on what you mean by "religious" and "moral." But definitions do matter, and I will not be able to avoid appealing to definitions. If you have a very broad definition of "religious" according to which being religious involves reverence, caring about what is sacred, being consistent (as when someone might say of an athlete that "she works-out religiouslyl") and if "morality" includes such elements, then, yes, there is an important (at least) intersection between being religious and being moral. But if by "religious" one means that one adheres to religious traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam.... then most philosophers have not thought that being religious is essential for being moral. In fact, many religious thinkers (theologians or sages) have insisted that morality (both the awareness of what is moral and the ability to live a moral life) is available for persons in general independent of one's religious beliefs and...

Great question. Here I think legal and ethical reflection are united (they are not always, alas). With no other details added to your question, I believe that A is guilty both for attempting to injure B (A would be guilty of assault) and for injuring C even though A did not have an intent to injure C. Usually, when someone is involved in a wrongdoing the scope of responsibility extends to those injured by the wrongdoing even if not intended --in robbing a bank, for example, someone might be responsible for (unintentionally) causing a bi-stander to have a heart attack. Things get more complicated, however, when the gravity of the wrongdoing is modest -e.g. someone is arrested for speeding-- and the consequences outrageous, e.g. the process of the arrest causes a truck driver to loose control of his truck and it causes a petroleum fire that kills thousands. In the later case, we would probably assign blame to the truck driver or the company for mechanical failures, rather than the drivers (person...

To begin with two very minor point (sorry if this seems "academic" in the negative sense!): Even if vows are social constructs, there might be something very special about vows. Second, you might well know when a vow should or should not be kept intuitively (a sort of knowledge from your gut feelings without knowing a precise principle), but this would not be a matter of whim. Someone might not have a definition of pornography, but it is not just a whim when they recognize porn on the internet. I need to defend some modest use of a "I know it when one sees it" principle due to the last line in this response. There is some reason to think that vows are special, explicit promises which makes them related to the implicit promise-making and breaking we do every day. So, when I say I will meet you for a coffee at 11:00, there is a sense in which I am making a promise to you and you have a right to find fault with me if I break the promise unless there are strong reasons to the contrary. Those reasons ...

Fascinating question. Off hand, it does seem that, in some cases, the motives you cite would make a difference. Imagine two people steal a sign advertising a bank that is involved with the unfair foreclosure of homes, leaving (let us imagine) many innocent persons homeless. A person who does the stealing as an act of protest and who, let us imagine, turns herself in to draw attention to this act of disobedience, seems (to use your terms) "less immoral" than one who steals the advertisement as a joke (perhaps using the sign as a tray to serve beer to friends while watching the world cup). In fact, we may find the person who did the theft out of matters of conscience heroic. The difficulty in weighing motives, however, emerges when we dig deeper into why the persons have the motives they do. Is the person who acts to protest capitalism doing *that* solely for the sake of amusement? I came of age in the early 1970s and was present protesting the inauguration of President Nixon. A good number of us...

I think your question is not only not dumb, it raises issues that would take a genius (someone far, almost infinitely more intelligent than myself!) to adequately address in terms of an overall account (and evaluation) of market economies, their values and the different roles they sustain and require. Moreover your question may require some account of what is involved (in the relevant sense) in creation, achievement, investments, and risk-taking (or what you refer to as gambling). Given the complexity of such background concerns, it seems virtually impossible to avoid replying to your question with something like: 'Maybe. Maybe not. It all depends....' I will attempt something that is a tiny bit more informative but without getting into the essential background concerns that really are essential for thinking more deeply on your excellent concern. Let me try, then, two responses, the first being quite general, the second more personal. THE GENERAL RESPONSE : Assuming we are in the context of a...

Great questions. Many philosophers recognize that we have multiple duties which sometimes conflict. And they also recognize different degrees of complexity that come with duties. So, in a parent-daughter relationship, it is widely acknowledged that a parent does have a duty to take care of her and thus, it is recognized that, other things being equal, it is better to care for her than not but some of the following circumstances can come into play: imagine that there are great social and political forces that would make it fatal if the parent comes forward to acknowledge that he or she is the parent. Or imagine that the parent was abusive and for example a daughter is utterly estranged from a father she never wishes to see again. And sometimes duties such as those you mention can present us with cases when one duty might be served by following another duty. So, your duty to care for your daughter might be satisfied by your joining an army: imagine that your city is under aggressive military attack and...

Great set of questions! You put your question in terms of morality rather than legality, but it might be worth first noting the legal angle. Basically, the law would attach responsibility and the consequences of the act based on what reasonable people would do and how they would interpret the act involved. So, imagine that the toy gun is obviously a toy (it is made of vegetables and has the word "toy" spelled on it out of carrots) and that the customer had a long history (known to the owner) of pranks. Under those circumstances, we might well conclude that the owner's belief that the gun and customer were real dangers was irrational. If the customer knew that the owner was subject to irrational judgments and that he/she had a weak heart condition, we might rightly find him morally blameworthy --the death would be a murder. But if the customer did NOT know of the irrational tendencies of the owner and did not know of the heart condition, I think we would be right in thinking this was a case of...

Interesting analogies and interesting questions! Two very modest initial observations: The idea that most in the past believed the earth is flat is open to question; there is an interesting book called (something like) the myth of a flat earth. Another point that is a bit less modest: substantial numbers of whites in the 18th century did not believe that blacks were subhuman. More on this below in connection with a comment on David Hume. You are right about how views change substantially in both science and ethics, and while in the 17th and 18th century European (and eventually American) views on slavery shifted, in the ancient Greco-Roman world slavery was considered as basic as any natural, unsurprising phenomenon. I suggest that in cases when, in a society some practice like slavery is thought of as natural and without a live alternative, then those who participate in the practice are less culpable than those who realize that slavery is unjust and that there are alternative cultures and...