You pose one of the great challenges confronting philosophical ethics: explaining the rational basis of morality. If your last claim--that all moral theories include premises you have no reason to accept--is correct, then I don't see how the challenge can be met. A number of philosophers have rejected this claim, however. Kant, for example, suggested that morality is grounded by premises you are rationally bound to accept. According to Kant, simply being a free agent requires you to accept the rational force of certain imperatives, and these imperatives then provide the basis or foundation of your moral obligations. Note that If Kant is correct, what grounds morality is not any biological fact about the ways in which our brains are hardwired. Rather, it is the metaphysical nature of rational agency that lies at the foundation of ethics. Consequently, any rational agent --human or otherwise--will be bound by the same obligations that bind you and me. Of course, it is not at all clear whether...

Philosophers love to talk about hypothetical situations (often called thought experiments ). Usually, we use thought experiments to help us draw distinctions or isolate intuitions that would be muddled or difficult to discern were we to limit our discussions to the actual world. Here is a nice example. There are a number of different views about what makes a person's life go better for that person--about what contributes to a person's well-being. Some philosophers think it is the satisfaction of that person's informed desires that contributes to his well-being. Others think it is experiences of happiness that make a life go better (regardless of what causes those experiences). How can you tell which view seems more plausible to you? It might help to think of some examples, but that turns out to be rather difficult if you focus on people in the actual world, since people whose informed desires are satisfied tend to be happy. In order to isolate the right intuitions, you may need to consult a thought...

For my answer to a similar question, click here .

I don't see how your approach can provide a way out of the debates concerning the objectivity of ethics. We can use your example of geometry to see why. You may be right that abstract or theoretical geometry is simply a matter of deriving theorems from a set of arbitrarily chosen postulates. But what about applied geometry ? I wouldn't be very comfortable working in a building designed by architects and built by engineers who don't care about the objectivity of the geometric principles they're using. I'm not going to hire an architect who is happy to adopt any old set of geometric axioms. Are you? There are real debates among physicists and philosophers about whether and to what extent space actually conforms to the principles of various geometric systems. These debates are about which geometry is the correct one. And so even if we take geometry as our model, we won't be able to escape those ongoing, heated debates about which moral system is the correct one.

I suppose it all depends on precisely what radical relativism is supposed to be. Let's assume that there is such a view, and that it is a coherent and consistent view at that. (I suspect that this assumption is entirely unfounded, but that's besides the point of your question.) Now, given this assumption, I'm not sure it makes sense to trust moral relativists with your cutlery any less than you trust moral absolutists. Let's imagine a moral relativist named Ray. On at least one understanding of relativism, the fact that Ray is a moral relativist says nothing at all about the content of his moral views. Ray can think that it's wrong to steal just as you and I do. What makes Ray a relativist is that he also happens to believe that the wrongness of stealing is somehow relative to himself, to his audience, or to his culture. And so if a guest at a dinner party announces that he's a relativist, you shouldn't assume that his morals are any different from yours. Moreover, if another guest at your dinner...

An apology is an acknowledgement of responsibility and an expression of regret. However, the words "I'm sorry" are not always meant to convey an apology. When I tell a friend who has recently lost a close relative that I'm sorry for his loss, I'm not accepting responsibility or expressing regret for anything I've done. I'm merely expressing my feelings of sympathy. So whether Zidane was inconsistent depends on precisely what he said. There would be nothing inconsistent at all about Zidane expressing sympathy with the French people for what happened but denying that he regrets his action. Of course, the problem with this is that most of us feel that Zidane should do more than say "I'm sorry" out of sympathy. He did something wrong, and he should say "I'm sorry" out of regret. He should, in other words, apologize . Let's see what he did say. According to the BBC's translation, it went like this: "It was inexcusable. I apologise. But I can't regret what I did because it would mean that...

Kant never says that good actions must be motivated by a sense of duty. What he does say is that actions have genuine moral worth to the extent that they are performed out of a sense duty. Many philosophers have certainly felt as you do--namely, that there is something backwards about this claim. I find it strangely compelling, and so let me try to motivate it a bit. Kant actually provides a wonderful example in the Groundwork . There he asks us to imagine someone (let's call him Joe) who spends his life doing good merely because he feels like it. He has a natural desire to help other people, and he takes great pleasure in meeting others' needs. Kant acknowledges that Joe's actions are "right" and "amiable," but he denies that these actions have any true moral worth. Kant believes that moral esteem is esteem of a very special sort. It is a sort of awe that we reserve for a select few actions and characters. But is there anything especially impressive or awe-inspiring about Joe simply...

I think there are two separate questions here, both contained in your first sentence. A good deed can indeed offset the mark of a bad one, but that does not mean that the moral worth of one action depends in any way on the moral worth of another. The moral worth of a particular action depends only on the action itself and the reasons for which it is performed. No amount of repentance or benevolence can erase the wrongness of a wrong act such as murder. That said, there is more to morality than the moral worth of particular actions. We also make moral judgments about people: Mary is a good person; John is wicked. And when it comes to evaluations of one's moral character, subsequent acts can and should play a role. Suppose that after John kills Mary in a fit of rage, he spends the rest of his life trying to make up for his crime. After serving his time and "paying his debt to society," John devotes himself to the goals that were most important to Mary. She was a dedicated advocate of the preservation...

If you really could "easily" stop the robbery and save someone'slife (without putting your own life in grave danger), then surely you do havea moral obligation to intervene. The fact that the violent man will certainly be punished seems to be entirely irrelevant to question ofwhat you ought to do. Punishing wrongdoers may be important,but preventing them from wrongdoing in the first place is of muchgreater importance!

When it comes to the case of David Irving, I find myself in complete agreement with the NYU philosopher David Velleman, who argues on his blog that Irving's conviction and coerced confession are a disaster. Together they create the distinct impression that Irving recanted only in order to reduce his sentence. How else are we to explain his sudden change of mind? It is certainly doubtful that, since his arrest, he has come across decisive evidence of which he had previously been unaware. This is a terrible outcome for those who want to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. As Velleman succinctly argues, "Irving's forced confession of error does more to undermine belief inthe Holocaust than his previous denials, by lending color to suspicionsthat the consensus among historians of the period is the product ofcoercion. The memory of the Holocaust can easily withstand the denialsof someone like Mr. Irving, but only if the refusal of historians toagree with him is clearly due to the force of evidence...