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Ethics
Punishment

Is one ever morally justified to beat someone up for making sexist and/or misogynist comments (this is a serious question)?

I can't see how it could be. Beating up someone for making sexist or misogynist comments is using physical violence to punish the commenter. That seems like literally the wrong type of reaction to merely verbal misconduct. (Notice that we don't punish slander or libel that way.) It's something like a category mistake , in addition to being a moral mistake.
Ethics

I recently read a philosophy book and it got me thinking about morality. Is not morality a tool of society to make it run smoother? If an action effects the world in a positive way than the action is good. If it effects in a negative way than it is bad. Now each human beings deepest desire is happiness and thats what each human strives for so I can only assume that society, as a group of humans, must strive for happiness as a whole as well. If this is true than the way society would decide if an action is good or bad would be the overall effect on happiness. So if we take all of this as true than it would seem that the morality of a decision can be measured and morality itself even made into a science. Is this not so?

I agree with you that the consequences of an action matter to its moral status. But unfortunately it's hard to specify exactly how the consequences matter. You wrote, "If this is true [then] the way society would decide if an action is good or bad would be the overall effect on happiness." On the most straightforward reading of your claim, there seem to be clear counterexamples to it. To use a fanciful example, suppose that we can spare each of 1 billion people the discomfort of a mild headache only by secretly subjecting you to excruciating torture for 24 hours, and suppose that the pain of your torture would be less than the aggregate pain of those 1 billion headaches. Nevertheless, it would be wrong (I take it) to torture you for that purpose, even though arguably we'd increase net happiness by doing so. So the impact of consequences on the moral status of an action can't be quite so straightforward. Therefore, even if we could "measure happiness" much more reliably than in fact we now can, it's...
Ethics
Freedom
Philosophy

I'm interested in the issue of whether people would have moral responsibility under determinism. So if a person in a deterministic universe would happen to commit murder, some people would say that they are morally responsible for the action, and others would disagree. When I speak of "moral responsibility" here I'm thinking along the lines of whether the person would deserve blame and retributive punishment. (If it actually happened that we lived in a deterministic universe, I assume that we would have to hold people morally responsible in some sense for practical reasons. We would have to punish to protect society and to deter future crime; but some might give up on the idea of retributive punishment and see criminals rather as unfortunate victims of the blind process of nature.) I'm not expecting a solution to the question, "Would people be morally responsible under determinism?". Rather I'm going to ask: could the issue be a conflict of opposing moral principles that may just be forever unsolvable...

You asked: "Could the issue be a conflict of opposing moral principles that may just be forever unsolvable by rational argument? So maybe you just can't produce arguments that can 'bridge the gap' between the two sides, i.e., the arguments just don't exist that would have the rational force and traction against the other side." I don't see it as a conflict of opposing moral principles. I think each side sees itself as trying to work out the implications of our shared concept of moral responsibility . One side thinks that our shared concept requires indeterminism; the other side thinks it doesn't. Or maybe our shared concept is inconsistent in both requiring and not requiring indeterminism, or we have two distinct concepts of moral responsibility, but even that I wouldn't classify as a conflict of moral principles. In any case, I'm not pessimistic about the possibility of making progress in this debate. Indeed, I think we've made progress in the last several years and will continue to. The new field of...
Biology
Ethics

Are there universal principles in healthcare, or is ethics in health care relativistic?

I presume you're asking a normative or conceptual question, rather than a descriptive question about how healthcare systems are in fact viewed or implemented in various places. I'd answer, then, that whether ethical principles are objective or relative, universal or particular, doesn't depend on the subject matter at hand. If ethical principles depend on the place or culture (like rules of etiquette), then it seems they must be relative no matter whether they concern the ethics of healthcare or (say) the ethics of meat-eating. On the other hand, if ethical principles are true or false objectively (like statements in chemistry), then it seems they must be true or false objectively regardless of the subject matter. I can't see how there could be objective principles concerning the ethical permissibility of eating meat but only culturally relative principles concerning the ethical permissibility of aborting a fetus or euthanizing a patient. This isn't to say that objective and universal principles of...
Ethics

My question involves "moral truths" or "ethical truths." I struggle to see how anyone could claim that a moral proposition is either true or false. By calling something either right or wrong are we simply expressing our feelings on the matter? Those that I've heard defend the proposition that there are moral truths seem to try a bit of "bait and switch." To claim that moral truths exist is to claim that something is true about the world. However in defense of the proposition it seems that defenders of moral truths state something similar to "the truth of this proposition is equivalent to how it works in the world" using a James style of pragmatism.

In my experience anyway, defenders of the existence of objective moral truths don't typically rely on a James-style pragmatist theory of truth. Have a look at the SEP entry on "Moral Realism," available here . The author is someone who accepts the existence of objective moral truths (unless I'm very much mistaken!), and he doesn't mention James or pragmatism even once.
Ethics
Religion

I notice that many of the people asking questions on your site are atheists. I am an agnostic; however, I can understand that many people see their religion as a guideline for moral/ethical behavior. Can we be ethical/moral without religion? If a person does not see that an ethical life leads to "heaven," what is his/her rationale for goodness?

You've asked a version of the very old philosophical question "Why be moral?" You may find something relevant to that question in the SEP entry linked here . I'd like to point out an assumption underlying your question. You seem to assume that someone has a rationale for acting morally only if acting morally serves his/her prudential self-interest (otherwise I can't see why you'd suggest that heaven is relevant to leading an ethical life). But why should we accept that assumption? Why must the answer to "Why be moral?" invoke something that's (arguably) nonmoral such as prudence? Why think that the ultimate or overriding rationale for doing something must be one's self-interest? In essence your question seems to be "Why does my doing the morally right thing always serve my long-term self-interest?" The answer, I'd say, is that there's no guarantee that it does . It might profit you in the long run to rob an innocent stranger if you'll never get caught; nevertheless, you...
Ethics
Religion

If I'm an atheist, does it make sense to criticize the Catholic church for practices such as the exclusion of female priests? Suppose that a Catholic authority replies to such criticism by saying that there is strong Biblical evidence to show that priests must be male. Since I am an atheist, I may be unpersuaded by this argument, and still insist that the church would be more just if it gave women equal status with men. But then, if I reject this Biblical argument it seems that I may as well reject Catholicism itself. In other words, I think there is something strange in the suggestion that Catholics should improve their religious practice by incorporating certain progressive reforms. The justification of these reforms often seems arise of a view that would invalidate, not just the allegedly objectionable practices at issue, but religion altogether. Practices such as the exclusion of female priests may strike me as irrational, but then why should I care if I think that Catholicism quite generally is...

One needn't accept Catholicism in order to argue, legitimately, that the reasons given for a specific Catholic practice, such as the male-only priesthood, aren't persuasive even granting the rest of Catholic theology. For example, if Catholic theology gives a biblical justification for the male-only priesthood, it's open to Catholics and non-Catholics alike to examine the justification to see how cogent it really is: even granting the truth of the Bible passages being used to justify the exclusion of women priests, do those passages really justify the exclusion, or have they been interpreted in a tortured or tendentious way? Is there another interpretation of the passages, an interpretation just as good as the traditional one, that doesn't justify the exclusion? I think anyone, Catholic or not, can legitimately ask those questions.
Ethics

I have often heard it argued that moral relativism prevents us from agreeing that our moral advances (e.g. civil rights, Gandhi, etc.) are conclusively good. I was of the belief, however, that moral relativism merely states that morality is a human construct and is defined by individual experience -- not that there is nothing that can be held to be fundamentally good. That is to say, I judge actions based on a utilitarian, distinctly non-theist ethic, but I do judge them. Does this argument refute moral relativism and, then, am I not a moral relativist?

It sounds to me as if you're not a moral relativist according to the usual definition of the term. I don't know any utilitarians who classify themselves as moral relativists. On the contrary, utilitarians regard the moral status of actions, institutions, etc., as objective rather than relative to individuals or cultures. For example, many utilitarians condemn the factory-farming of animals as objectively immoral because of the suffering it causes, even though the practice is widely accepted in at least the developed nations. By contrast, moral relativism says that any moral assertion, such as the assertion "Factory-farming is wrong," is true or false only relative to the culture (or maybe the individual beliefs) of whoever makes the assertion.
Ethics

Would it be logically coherent to have a world in which everything that happened was bad or have a world in which everything that happen was good? Can good and evil exist independently of each other? Do we need one to define or contrast the other? Can each of them be definable in their own right? Is there any arguments that can be put forth to show that good and evil are not polar concepts?

You've raised a large and complex set of issues. I'll address just one part of one of your questions. It seems to me that the burden of proof rests with whoever claims that good can't possibly exist without evil. For one thing, the claim implies that the monotheistic God is impossible, since God is supposed to be perfectly good and independent of anything distinct from himself (or at any rate independent of evil). Moreover, it's not as if every property is instantiated only if its complement is instantiated. The property of being self-identical is instantiated by everything, but necessarily its complement, the property of being self-distinct, is instantiated by nothing. The property of being physical is instantiated by many things, but it's at least controversial whether the property of being nonphysical is instantiated at all.
Education
Ethics

I love reading the Qs and As on this site, and a recent post recommended a book "The Elements of Moral Philosophy" by Rachels. I got the book from my local library and really enjoyed it. What would be a good follow-up book on these topics? I have a hard time slogging through the original basic philosophy works, so I really value a book like this that is serious but not too technical for a layperson. Thanks.

In the category "serious but not too technical for a layperson," I'd include Russ Shafer-Landau's short paperback Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? . It concentrates on metaethics (the fundamental nature of ethics) and moral epistemology (how we might know moral truths, if there are any) rather than normative ethics (particular theories of right and wrong). It's clear, accessible, provocative in places, and enjoyable.

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