Good question. Perhaps there are at least two points to bear in mind in reply: the literature that is classified as utopia (and recall "utopia" means " no place") often is NOT about some ideal place that its authors hope to encourage establishing. This is pretty clear in Thomas More's Utopia --which contains much satire and fun. It also seems true in Christine de Pizan's City of Ladies, and is probably true also of Plato's ideal polis in the Republic (though this is quite controversial). Second, there is a view sometimes called ethical idealism, according to which we should seek the ideal even if it is virtually certain we will never attain it. Presumably this is the way at least some Christians act: they set out to fully imitate Christ or be sinless, even though they also believe that they will not perfectly attain this. Ethical idealism is in tension with a position associated with Kant that "ought implies can." According to the latter, an essential condition for you to have a duty to do X is...

Good points. Moreover, some adventurers appear to want to have "no-rescue zones." This topic sometimes comes up under the general heading "a wilderness without hand-rails." Still, cases arise when persons set out on ventures without renouncing rescue efforts and this does raise troubling issues. We routinely don't blame persons for not rescuing those in peril if the rescue is highly dangerous and is likely to lead to even greater dissaster. But in cases such as the one you are referring to other factors seem to come into play. Perhaps the American sailer comes to symbolise or represent more than herself: she is not merely Jane Doe, but she comes to represent American youth or teenage ambition or female courage or all three. And how we respond to her in a case of distress seems to reveal, in part, the value we attach to youth, courage, and so on. I agree with you that there is a sense in which it would appear to be more ethical to use funds to buy food or medicine for those who are in peril due to...

Great question! Undoubtedly there is a neurological basis for conscious thinking and so there is a sense in which the brain plays a role in sustaining thinking and the brain definitely has a location, BUT it is not clear whether thoughts themselves are the sorts of things that can have location. Does the thought "New York City is not the capital of New York State" have a certain size or weight or mass or color? It would be odd to think so. But let's consider where thoughts go, not in terms of spatial location, but in relationship to our conscious minds. Some philosophers acknowledge that in addition to our conscious mental life there is the unconscious and the sub-conscious. The difference between these is not obvious, but in general the former is thought to be more difficult to retrieve or bring to the surface of full consciousness. Presumably you know many things or can be said to have lots of thoughts about subjects you are not consciously reflecting on now. This knowledge is sometimes...

Great question. Off hand, it seems that this would not make a difference. Presumably, it would be just as wrong to have a human child in order to harvest his organs whether or not the child had been engineered to want this fate. Sometimes wanting or consenting does make a substantial moral difference. Robbery, rape, and the like, crucially depend on a person not consenting to an act; if I want you to take something I own then (in a general sense) I am more or less giving it to you and a robbery (in the straight forward sense) has not taken place. But in the case you present, we do not think the cows are exercising their freedom; it appears they have no choice but to want to be eaten. In this case (unlike the robbery case) it seems their wanting this fate does not make a moral difference. If we assume (for the sake of argument) some form of moral vegetarianism (it is morally wrong to kill cows to eat them), then the presence of the 'want' would not seem to make a moral difference. However, let us...

Brilliant question. I suggest that simply to have a world-view or general outlook on what there is and its meaning or value is to have a philosophy. In this sense, virtually all persons have some kind of philosophy (even if it is highly skeptical). In this very general sense of the word 'philosophy' I suggest that any question about world-views is (again, in general) a philosophical question. Questions about governance can be interpreted as questions about one's philosophy of politics (or political philosophy). More specifically, though, 'philosophy' names the practice of inquiry into world-views (what exists and why?) values, and so on, with an aim to identify which positions are more reasonable or evident (hence the preoccupation of philosophy with matters of justification). Some questions can, I believe, be more philosophical than others. So, a question about (for example) what a person believes about God would be philosophical in a general sense if the question was aimed at doing no more than...

Great question. A huge amount of thought is being devoted to the assessment of the mental life of nonhuman animal. Some (but I don't think a majority) philosophers still deny that we can rightly recognize (morally relevant) pain in beings without language, but I think it is quite reasonable to think that cows feel pain (given what appears to be pain-avoidance behavior, their brains and nervous system) even in the absence of language. So, let us grant that a human being and a cow can be hurt, they both can feel pain, and then ask whether if the hurt causes equal pain, then hurting the human and cow is equally wrong. There is some reason to think that we cannot draw that conclusion, because of factors that go beyond pain. Imagine a cow feels the same intensity of pain, you feel when someone slaps you (hard). The pain felt by the cow and you may be equal, but there could be more serious harms going on in your case (you have just been insulted or been betrayed by a friend or ..) that is not undergone by...

Philosophy of action concerns the analysis of agency and take up such questions as: What is it to be an agent? Is agency best explained in terms of beliefs and desires? In addition to beliefs and desires, must agency also involve a unique, additional power, such as the power to act or the power to form and act on intentions? How should acts be distinguished? Arguably, you can be doing more than one thing in making a single move (greet someone as well as signal an espionage agent that you are ready to return to the submarine). Should we count how many actions you are doing right now (reading, passing time, thinking about your own views on this topic) based on what you deliberately will? When is an agent free? Are free actions explainable scientifically? When are you responsible for your actions? And then there are more peripheral, but interesting questions: Do corporations act? Do you act in dreams and, if so, are you responsible for what you do in dreams?

Excellent question. It is excellent partly because it goes to the heart of the nature of freedom: freedom makes little sense without a context. So, it makes sense to ask of a person at any time whether she or he is free to do X, but in the case you are imagining there is no will of the child prior to the parent's decision making. So, we do not have a case of when, say, a two year old child is given some character-transforming infusion, we are rather focussing in on the very gestation and emergence of the child. I suggest that there might be reasons to discourage this kind of engineering (perhaps such engineering might tend to make parents feel they have a kind of ownership over their children), but that such engineering need not be seen as an imposition of the parents' will "onto the will of the child" with one proviso. That condition concerns whether the child has any freedom once she reaches maturity to be (for example) not optimistic, not competitive, to neglect her intellectual talents, to be non...

Great question. In a sense, the claim (or assumption) that there is a link between a major aesthetic category beauty and ethics / morality goes back to Plato. From a Platonic point of view, is some act is wicked, it is evil, and if some act is ethical it is beautiful (or, in difficult matters), the least ugly act possible. The close link between beauty and moral goods and virtues continues on up through the Renaissance. Today, there is disagreement about the extent to which ethics and aesthetics conflict; some argue that the two realms are altogether different (a standard claim by those who believe in the separation of ethics and aesthetics is that Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will is an excellent film aesthetically but morally horrifying) whereas some of us still seek to bring them together. You can get a good overview of the state of play in this debate in the collection Aesthetics and Ethics edited by Jerrold Levinson (Cambridge University Press). In terms of systematic defenses of the...

GREAT question! Most philosophers today in the English speaking world are materialists of one sort or the other. And so, they would hold that (to use your terms) the brain contains the mind or the brain is the mind or the person is the body, and so on. Those who hold that the mind (again, to use your terms) extends beyond the brain may still be materialists. Lynne Baker, for example, contends that the person is composed of the body as a whole (not just the brain), but she is still a materialist, and not a dualist. As it happens, I adopt a very unpopular position: integrative dualism, the view that while the person and body are a functional unity, the person (or mind or self) is not identical to her body or a body part (the brain). Arguments over theses positions would take us deep into the philosophy of mind literature. For a defense of integrative dualism, keep your eyes open for The Soul Hypothesis, ed by Stewart Goetz and Mark Baker (London: Continuum Press, forthcoming).