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Ethics

My aunt once complained about how the dumb the janitor of my high school was. He didn't seem very bright to me either. But, why do people think it's okay to put others down just because they are dumb? I am warranted in having less respect for my aunt for being that way or is it hypocritical to be judgmental to people who are judgmental?

Great questions! First, I suggest that a person who feels compelled to use the term "dumb" to describe others may be doing so out of their own insecurity (why feel the need to put others down, unless perhaps to feel superior?), but more importantly using the term "dumb" in that way seems pretty insulting just by itself. Saying someone does not seem very bright is much better (I think) than calling someone dumb or stupid or an idiot or (even) slow. So, to begin to get to your last question, I suggest you might want to avoid thinking or saying that your aunt is dumb for thinking others are dumb! (This would involve simply trading insults.) But I think you might well be warranted in not respecting her being so judgmental, and this can be done while still respecting her as a person and as your aunt. I think there is a difference between making a judgment and being judgmental; the latter seems to involve excessive blaming or being condescending. Going out on a limb, I wonder if there is an indirect...
Ethics

Why are insults that refer to a person's personality, lifestyle or hobbies considered more acceptable (or at least less serious) than insults to a person's race, sex or disability? I used to think that it was because personality, lifestyle and hobbies are mutable, whereas race, sex and disability are things a person has no control over - yet there are plenty of examples to the contrary (Many personalities don't change without outside intervention; transsexuals change their physiological sex; disabilities can be the result of one's own voluntary actions; Micheal Jackson went white; etc.). Not only that, but why should it matter whether or not a person has control over the things being made fun of? I only see two possibilities. First, it could be a question of fairness - in which case, why is it fair to insult things that a person can change but that are nevertheless a part of them as human beings? This brings me to the second possibility - maybe we are implicitly endorsing a norm like "If the insults...

Great questions and suggestions! Perhaps, though, one needs to back up a bit and consider whether anything we would call an insult is morally in the clear. Off hand, it strikes me that there is a huge difference between offering criticism about some practice or a person's behavior and insulting a practice or person's action. Isn't an insult a matter of abuse or defemation or to slur someone? If I give a student paper a C, have I insulted the student? It may feel that way, and I suppose it would be an insult if I intended to abuse the student and diminish his sense of self-worth (imagine that on a fair minded assesment the paper merits an A and I have a personal grudge against the student). In that sense, I suppose I would be not just insulting the student but I would be an embarassment to my profession and to my school. So, off hand, it seems that insults (by their very nature) are not good. I do not suggest you disagree, because you do describe insults in terms of disrespect, but I thought it...
Ethics

Can empathy cause people to be immoral? Like if you empathize with a criminals motives will that lead you to excusing them?

It seems that while "empathy" and "sympathy" come from the term for "feeling with" and so might simply refer to your being able to understand affectively what another person is going through, we sometimes do use the terms to indicate more than a shared understanding. So, when someone says they empathize with why someone committed a crime, it seems they are claiming that the action was intelligible or it made some kind of sense. Read in this more supportive fashion, I suppose you are right or, putting things differently, you may want to be careful of your own property if you know someone who empathizes with people who love to steal all the time. But stepping away from this supportive sense of 'empathize,' we have good reason to think that ideal moral reflection would include some degree of affective understanding of all the parties involved. So, a judge who is determining what sort of penalty to give for a thief need not positively empathize with the robber, but we would expect the judge to have some...
Ethics

Dear Philosophers, I have been dating a woman for one year. She's been away studying at a university in another country for the last few months, but is coming back soon. All the time we've been together, she's had some problems that I think were depression. But now she's become worse, so that it's having a big impact on her daily life. She's getting treatment abroad, but attitudes towards and treatment of mental health problems are terrible back here. Our conversations together are no fun at all - we only talk about her daily problems, which I can't help with at all. I feel like this is all too much for me. But I also feel (1) I have a responsibility to help her through this, (2) she might commit suicide if I left her, (3) that it would be callous to give up faith in her getting better. For my own sake, I think I should break up, but I don't know how much weight to give to the above three concerns.

This is clearly a very difficult matter and I feel quite unqualified to reply, but it sounds as though there is a middle ground between staying in a dating relationship and (to use your terms) break up, leave her, give up faith in her, being callous. I suppose there are some relationships which are either romantic or simply not on, but perhaps in your case there has from the beginning been a combination of romance and friendship? You seem deeply concerned about her over the year you have been together (plus you feel responsible for her now) and this seems to be a sign of the deep care one has as a friend and for a friend. Option 2 seems like a corrosive, unsustainable reason for continuing a romantic relationship (I would think that 2 would feel like entrapment), but I wonder if you might be able to work on 1 and 3 but as a friend without the dating. Philosophers from Plato onward have (from time to time) worked on a philosophy of friendship, and most of them have concluded that it is marked (at best)...
Ethics

Suppose that once a year, Alice donates $25,000 to a children's hospital, and that this sum allows them to hire a part-time employee to take care of the children. Bob, on the other hand, volunteers for twenty hours a week at an identical children's hospital, which saves them from having to hire a part-time employee that would cost them $25,000 a year. Some people might say that what Bob is doing is more ethically admirable than what Alice is doing, because Bob is dedicating time he can't get back, whereas Alice is "merely" throwing money at the hospital. Is Bob's behavior really more admirable than Alice's? If so, why? Why might we assume such a thing?

Great question(s). I wonder if we have simply different goods in play here rather than clear cut cases of greater and lesser goods. I wonder if there are at least four distinctions that may help us think through your question. I will do my best to dinstinguish a few of them, though in the end I suggest we may have to conclude that too many additional factors that are not specified in your case may cause us to alter our evaluation(s). Your point about time is really important. Someone who dedicates time for the hospital will not get that back (as you observe), but it might also be the case that someone who is giving the money to the hospital (but not volunteering) earned the money and will not get that time back that she spent getting the money. Still, maybe we can distinguish between types of what might be called Temporal Dedications or simply (and with less jargon) different types of ddications of time. Other things being equal, I suppose we think the person that dedicates more time to a...
Ethics
Religion

What reasons do atheists have for caring about other people or for being socially responsible? Is there any difference other than semantics that differentiates those reasons from reasons derived from religious beliefs? (in other words, reasons to care about others or for being socially responsible seem only to derive from one of two sources: (a) "enlightened expanded selfishness" (if we all do it the world is a better place), or (b) because somehow it is the "right" thing to do, and the only issue in this case is the source that makes it "right"). Whenever I discuss this question with self-professed atheists, their arguments come across as sounding like "I don't like the term 'god'" or "I don't like the bad things that have been done in the name of organized religion". In other words, they also believe in something greater than the individual and are arguing over what to call it or how to describe it or where its justification comes from, yet underneath it all, they spring from a belief that...

This seems like a very insightful interpretation of what may unite some compassionate secular persons with people of faith who are also compassionate agents today. I especially appreciate your implied view that persons of faith who care for others and are compassionate are not doing so simply in obedience to (for example) divine commands. Both the religious and secular person may well transcend narrow self-interest, but I suggest there still is a significant difference between the two. A religious person in the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition as well as in Hinduism and Buddhism and other faiths believe that there is something sacred about caring for others. For Abrahamic faiths,for example. it is not only good to care for others because they are valuable in themselves, but also because they are created and loved by God. I am not suggesting that people who are secular and compassionate are thereby at a disadvantage or somehow working with an impaired view of vaues. Someone like George Kated ...
Ethics

When a person's irresponsible behavior leads to the death of another person such as the case of drunk driving we naturally assign culpability to that person. Should a person who's irresponsible behavior leads to them being raped be held to a degree of moral culpabilty? To what degree if any?

Interesting questions. I suggest that the disanalogies of the two cases are quite significant. In the drunk driving case, the person drunk is (usually) the direct cause of the death. In the case of rape, the person being raped cannot be the direct cause of the harm. In most, if not all cases without a single exception, I assume most or all of us think that rape is so heinous that no behavior, however irresponsible, by the victim can lead us to blame him or her. While I stand by that judgment myself, perhaps one should concede that there can (in principle) be cases when, for example, a person initiates a "rape fantasy" or consents to an extreme sado-masochist event, and perhaps these make it more likely there will be an actual rape, but once a person says "no" I suggest that "no" means "no" and the guilt borne by the rapist is not at all mitigated by the prior consent. Moreover, the prior consent and circumstances are irrelevant in terms of the harm done to the victim, a harm that is also not...
Ethics

Legal status aside, is a person who steals $1,000 from a very rich person acting just as unethically as a person who steals $1,000 from a poor person?

Very interesting! Maybe not. If both cases involved equal malice and hate or the money was extracted with the same amount of violence, we might think both thieves are equally worthy of blame. Obviously the first thief has done more damage because a rich person is less vulnerable to extreme poverty and the second thief has perhaps doomed the poor person to complete destruction, and so we might naturally think that the first thief is less cruel than the second, but I don't think this is necessarily the case. In some cases we might even reverse this judgment. Imagine that thief who steals from the poor person has no other means of getting money that will rescue his or her family who will die unless they use the funds for medicine (imagine there are no rich people around and EVERYONE is poor), whereas the thief going after a rich person is doing it for a thrill or to buy a ticket to a pretentious play.
Children
Ethics
Love

I live with my husband and his mother. My mother in law seems to have issues with me; she picks fights and tries to manipulate my husband into treating me like dirt just the way she does. She is more than just a meddler. She seems to have strange episodes that might qualify as a mental problem such as depression. My husband always takes her side and goes crazy on me saying that his number one responsibility is to his mother. My question is what is the morally acceptable thing here? Does my mother-in law deserve more of my husband's 'respect' than I do? It seems that he thinks I should never say ill about her even when she's clearly in the wrong.

What a difficult situation! You may be dealing with a matter that involves different cultural traditions. If, for example, you and your family's background is Confusian there may be a primacy of hnor due to parentss, but if you are in Jewish or Chrisitian context then, while honor is due to parents, your primary loyalty is to the marriage partner (Genesis 2:24 institutes marriage as a matter of of a man and by implication, a woman leaving father and mother and father and "becoming one"). But setting aside cultural or religious expectiations, I think most people would understand the vow that established your marriage as promising always to love and respect each other. Sometimes this vow includes a line about "foresaking all others" which suggests the primacy and exclusively important nature of the marriage bond. In light of that, I find it difficult to believe that respect and love would lead to the kind of reproachful behavior you are describing. It would be interesting (but probably most unwise...
Ethics

Can experience provide us with the data for making a decision about what is morally right or wrong?

It would be hard to deny this, though some philosophers have claimed that morality may be grasped a piori or independently of experience. Perhaps simple reflection on what it is to be a person or to be rational can generated some reasonable moral claims, but it certainly appears that our values from the value of friendship to justice to happiness are shaped by the broad spectrum of human experience, and it therefore appears that experience and reflection can 'provide us with the data for making a decision about what is morally right or wrong.' One can see in simple cases how experience might play a crucial role: someone might have no sympathy for those who are unemployed until he has lost his job, a person might not care at all where her food comes from until she sees a film on factory farming, someone might not care a fig for a country's foreign policy until his neighbor's son is killed in a foreign war, somoene may think homosexuality is an unnatural perversion until he realizes several seemingly...

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