Great question. One way to think of this would be to hold that you both have an equal duty to care for the parents, but in your case this might mean more visits and in-person contact, due to geography. So, imagine your older brother lives in China while you are in the states and 8 miles away from your parents. Imagine that for your older brother to make it to your parents' home involves great costs, personally, professionally and economically. In that case, perhaps him coming to help out during a home visit once a year for a week would involve greater costs than you seeing the parents regularly througout the year. On this view, you both would have an equal duty to look after them and both of you would be giving of yourselves in roughly equal proportion, even if that involves you caring for them more frequently. Having been through a similar experience of caring for parents and having siblings, I might add that while such care-giving for parents can be quite strssful and taxing, you also have an...

This is a BIG question! Some skeptics, like J.L. Mackie, will deny that there is any real. objective thing in the world that matches up to "moral goodness." He might say that all we have are definitions, such as the ones you offer, each of which happens to be in error. But probably a majority of philosophers today (or a great deal of them) adopt some form of moral realism, according to which some acts are truly morally good (seeking compassion and peace, to use your example) and some are truly morally bad (torturing the innocent). I assume, too, that your two cases of the Bible-based morality and the compassion-peace morality are going to have some serious overlap. In other words, there are lots of precepts in the Bible urging us to be compassionate and seek peace, and I imagine that someone who seeks compassion and peace probably will be opent to respecting religious teachings that uge us to "help, and do not hinder, others in achieving their own peaceful ends." I suspect that answering...

What an interesting situation, perhaps one that is unique, given the advance in technology. In a less technological age, when you had to tap phones or literally follow someone around to observe them, the line between respectful and disrespectful behavior might be clearer. Still, even in cases when a person might use stealth and covertly or even openly follow someone in public, so long as this was not done in a fashion that suggests a threat, the "stalker" may not be breaking any clear moral (or legal) codes. The idea is that when you go out in public, you more or less waive your right to privacy (the right not to be observed, in particular). But when it comes to the internet, it seems that you are only using sites and getting information and pictures that are licit or that people have themselves made public, and thus you are not breaking any privacy rules. So, let's imagine that you never use the information and pictures for any untoward ends (blackmail, extortion, harrasment, voyeurism....) and so...

Great questions that have vexed many philosophers who have reflected on parenthood and debts of gratitude. Some philosophers (perhaps most famously John Locke) worked historically to limit the control of parents over children. Locke opposed what may be called patriarchalism and a tradition, that goes back at least to Roman times, that a parent (especially a father) could, by virtue of being a parent, exercise tremendous power (in ancient times this included the power of life and death) over the child. This seems to have been built on what you are calling a structual component (you created the child, therefore you have power over him or her) and this could back up claims on the child to demonstrate family loyalty. Behind Plato's dialogue the Euthyphro there is a hint that Socrates himself may have thought that a child should honor his father. (In the dialogue, Socrates challenges a man intent on prosecuting his father.) In any case, I suggest that there may be a prima facie debt of gratitude...

I am a little confused by the last question --the fault is mine, I am sure, but let me have a go at what you have written. Some philosophers have been and are skeptical about the objective status of ethics. Probably a philosopher like J.L. Mackie who wrote a book called Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (approximate title) might think that ethics is indeed very much unlike deliberating about (for example) how to get to Yellowtone Park from New York City. Though I suppose if Mackie was highly skeptical about sense perception and genuinely doubted whether anyone could say Yellowstone Park exists, he might think ethics and geography are in the same boat! In any case, those of us who are not skeptical of perception and ethics might question what you advance as a disanalogy. So, in the case you cite, a moral philosopher may argue that the man should break off his affair on the grounds that it breaks a vow he has made or it involves wrongul deception or it dishonors his marriage and family and the...

Good heavens! Unless you both had an explicit understanding that neither would attend an adult party, it is hard to see this as a violation, and even if one did have such an agreement it is hard to see how such a "violation" warrants calling someone a whore and threaten to cut off all sexual intimacy! I am sure this matter is more a topic for a marriage therapist than a professional philosopher, but I shall hesitantly suggest three things: it might be good to shift the questioning from matters of guilt / innocence / confession... to asking what is the most loving thing to do right now....both for your husband and for you. He seems to be treating the event on a par with sustained adultery or, short of adultry, a case of grave, personal betrayal and deception. But rather than getting focussed on whether the event was innocent (from his point of view, for it does sound innocent from your point of view), maybe the focus can be on what would the most loving thing be to do now. Second, the charge of being...

Great question! It does seem that there are cases when family or romantic relations would provide a very good reason for a person not to engage in heroic self-sacrifice. Imagine a peson is deciding between professions: a crime fighter who would be in a unit where there is a 30% morality rate over a full career or a physician. Imagine both tasks would involve saving the same number of lives, but being a physician has a very low probability of injury or even threats and so would require less bravery. If you were in that position of deciding what to do and your partner / family urged you to be a physician, I think you might have a family duty to take the less brave choice. There is actually a Biblical edict in Deuteronomy, I think, that notes that when a soldier marries, he is relieved of military duties for one or two years. That would be a case in which family / perhaps romantic love (?) might trump one's obligation to be brave in battle. Perhaps, though, the hero who saves the stranger is also...

A foundatoinal question or a question that gets to the very basis of ethics itself! "Ethics" today includes matters of virtue and vice as well as the morality of action. In much of the history of ideas and culture as well as today, it is widely held that what counts as moral or immoral or as a virtue or vice is NOT a matter of an individual's decision so that I, for example, could re-label my massive, self-centered egotism as "humility" or I could define my stealing your money so that I can buy luxory gifts for my slaves as "charity." In a sense, being part of a community or (to get even broader in scope) being a mature human being involves taking seriously what it is to act responsibly and respectfully concerning oneself and others. And this seems to be a matter that cannot be done only in terms of how individuals define for him or herself what is good or bad. Still, there is a tradition in ethics going back at least to Kant which stresses the importance of each individual coming to understand...

Good question! There may be several alternatives to consider. First, there may be objective normative truths (e.g. to torture the innocent is unjust) even if we are unable to arrive at what Russell would clasify as a "rational argument" on behalf of such truths. Secondly, we may have knowledge of normative truths on the basis of something other than what Russell would call "rational argument." There is a revival of late of intuitionism, which claims that we can intuit basic values. Some in the natural law camp (John Finnis) have proposed that some objective norms are self-evident (and thus can be known per se nota). A third point to consider is that even if you reject intuition or insight, there are all sorts of considerations that can come into play when considering the identity of basic goods. One can reflect on the implications of accepting such basic goods by investigating actual cases as well as hypothetical cases involving what philosophers call thought experiments. So, in a debate over...

Great question! In some ethical frameworks (such as utilitarianism) there are principles of maximazation principles according to which we are morally obligated to do the most good possible (and the least evil or bad). If you adopt such a framework and have reason to believe that the dental / facial surgery non-profit would result in less than optimal results, then you should not start the alternative non-profit. Many philosophers resist an unqualified maximization principle, however, as it would seem to require virtually constant heroism and self-sacrifice that seems (intuitively anyway) to be "above and beyond the call of duty." Without directly trying to answer your question, I suggest you might consider more categories than moral - immoral. I believe few of us (philosophers or non-philosophers) would ever deem founding the dental non-profit would be immoral. One would be addressing a foundational need and correcting a serious impairment. I also think it is not clear that if pesons support the...