Interesting! Your focus on a college may well be more complex than your last example involving the entitlements of taxpayers concerning their government. Concerning the latter, it seems that, at least in a democracy, the taxpayer can join forces with others and control the government through voting. Presumably in most colleges students do not elect their administrators, staff, and faculty, but they can do a vote of no-confidence in the administration through their student governing body (usually a senate), and often student evaluations are taken seriously in the hiring and tenuring of faculty. Concerning your specific example, you refer to "a group of students" contending that their petition for divesting the college's funds from (for example) supporting arms manufacturing based on the grounds that the funds themselves are generated by the students. In that case, I think you make a good point about cases of when the funding is not tuition-driven. But I suggest that students do not always or often...

Good question. There have been at least two lines of reasoning that have some following among philosophers. The first consists of seeking to object to the positive reasons that are advanced for vegetarianism and against raising animals for food. So, Peter Singer initially built his case for vegetarianism on a utilitarian foundation to the effect that raising animals and killing them causes undeserved suffering. Arguably, however, it seems that he would not have a strong reason to object to painless killing. And if you breed animals who have happy lives, there might even be a utilitarian reason for having large numbers of animals that then meet a painless end. A second kind of argument has been launched by R.G. Frey (who, sadly, died last year), Peter Carruthers, and others that animals lack morally relevant interests. Frey and Carruthers argue for this on the grounds that animals lack language. The argument is quite controversial as it is based on the view that there cannot be non-linguistic...

Good question and set of concerns. I gather you are dismayed by how some persons' faith may seem irresistible to counter-evidence. I suppose an analogy would be a case when I continue to trust my husband is a good man on the grounds that he sometimes demonstrably cares for me and I explain the times that he neglects or seems to injure me on the grounds that he must be so very wise that his action or inaction is actually good for me. That's a problem. When it comes to reflecting on God in response to your concerns, perhaps three points are worth considering. First, according to the major theistic traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, God is a reality that is omnipresent and immanent to creation, but also the transcendent creator and sustainer of the cosmos. So the concept of God seems vastly to outstrip any ordinary, finite agent. So, when reflecting on God we should think not of the ethical ways of finite creatures but, as it were, the values that would be in play if there is a Creator...

Hello Jude! To begin with your last question, some argue the persons have a right to take their own life or allowed to die (when this might be prevented if there was medical intervention) based on the idea that a person owns her or himself or, more specifically, a person owns his or her body. I suppose this might involve an appeal to bodily integrity insofar as this line of reasoning appeals to the notion that a person has a wholeness or an unimpeded right to do what she wants with her body. In many and perhaps most countries we do not legally allow persons to do anything at all with their bodies, even if no harm comes to others. In the USA, there are limits even when use of the body would benefit others. I cannot go to a hospital in my country and offer to donate all my organs to those in need. Well, I physically can do this, but if I demonstrate to a hospital that I am sane and a free agent and request "Please harvest all my organs now!" I will be politely turned down lest the hospital be...

Your frustration is understandable! In English, we used to have fine distinctions between the terms ethics and morality, duties and obligations, labor and work, recklessness and negligence..... but we English-speakers seem less keen about the finer distinctions at work. One might easily conflate the terms just and moral; saying a law is unjust seems the equivalent of claiming that a law is immoral (or the establishment of the law is morally wrong). But, there is still some distinctions to observe: justice usually pertains to matters of governance and human rights. And there are different domains of justice: Distributive justice concerns the distribution of goods and burdens; Retributive justice refers to matters of punishment; Restorative justice refers to compensation for past wrongful harms, and so on. Such forms of justice are related to rights, distributive justice may concern itself with a person's having a right to health care, retributive justice needs to address respecting or violating a...

Great question! At first blush, "self-plagiarism" seems absurd, like forging one's own signature or stealing from oneself. But just as we can imagine odd circumstances when even these other seemingly absurd cases might be attempted (imagine I have amnesia and forgotten I am Charles Taliaferro, and think, instead, my real name is John Doe; I go to a bank and pretend to be Charles Taliaferro and sign a check with that name, I then break into Charles Taliaferro's apartment, take everything and sell it on the black market using the name John Doe). On inspection,though, self-plagiarism is actually less odd than the strange adventures of John Doe. It usually consists in re-using work you have published elsewhere and raises copy-right concerns. Self-plagiarism occurs when, say, you have an essay published in The Journal of Philosophy but then use 90% of the article to form a new essay with a new title in a book, say, published by Princeton University Press without crediting the original publisher or...

Not an easy question to answer as one can imagine all kinds of factors entering the picture: imagine the human being is s murderer who threatens to kill you or someone who intends to commit suicide after the rescue or imagine the human asks you to rescue the animal instead of him or herself. Leaving aside that humans are also animals, the nonhuman animal may be carrying a deadly disease or a being with very little evidence of thought, emotion, and rationality (like an ant) or it may be a porpoise who rescued you when you were drowning (there is a record of such a rescue in the first history in the west by Heroditus (Book I of his Histories). But leaving aside all these complications, I think we humans are naturally disposed to value other humans because of our being thinking, feeling, reflective individuals who are capable of appreciating and protecting values, being creative and imaginative, capable of entering into worthy, loving relationships, beings who have meaningful goals and desires, and other...

Thank you for these observations and the question of how virtue ethics comes into play with the streetcar thought experiment! The dilemma is, indeed, intended to force us to think about the moral status of action versus omission, and this goes to the heart of some utilitarian and Kantian matters. Utilitarians tend to treat an act and an omission on equal terms: so if you do not throw a switch in which case you would have saved five people at the cost of one, some utilitarians are prone to think that you would be responsible for the death of four people. Kantians or deontologists tend to think that what you do is not crucially dependent on consequences but in terms of treating persons as ends in themselves, and they think in terms of duties (come what may). In an interesting new two volume book, On What Matters, the philosopher D. Parfit argues that Kantianism and utilitarianism ultimately are compatible and should (on reflection) reach the same conclusion. Your question was about virtue theory,...

I suggest it is not always ethically permissible to seek self-preservation. Imagine that you need a heart transplant to survive and the only way to get a heart is by harvesting and thus killing another person (imagine the person is innocent, unwilling to die to offer you his heart, etc). Or imagine you and another person are in peril at sea, the other person has a life preserver that she owns, it can only support one person, and while it is likely she will survive in time for a rescue boat to arrive, you will otherwise drown. In that case, I suggest it would be wrong in fact, it would be a case of murder for you to take the life preserver from the other person with the outcome that you survive and she drowns. I believe that the criminal law in many countries does not permit self-preservaton as an excuse for killing: for example, I think that if someone made a plausible threat to you ("I will kill you unless you kill those people over there") this does not mean you can do just anything to preserve your...

You are on to a puzzle or problem that has vexed some philosophers at least going back to Plato. In some of the Platonic dialogues it is proposed that art (like theatre) is an imitation of life, and that if something is evil in life (like a mother killing her children) there is something evil or not good about imitating it or acting it out as one would in the play Medea. From that point of view, acting out murder (but using only fantasy violence, viz. no one is physically killed) would not itself be good (and a traditional Platonist might even call it evil or murderous). But (after Aristotle and much history) we seem to have moved beyond Plato and enjoy theatre, films, novels that depict horrific evils. I personally am drawn to a middle ground. Let's say the LARP ing includes evil and good knights, wizards, and so on, and we wind up with epic battles akin the one that occurs at the end of The Hobbit. Off hand, this seems no more objectionable than performing Hamlet. But imagine the LARP ing...