I don't quite understand why people put so much time and effort into conversing with other people about their internal "belief systems." To me, the only thing that really matters is how other people behave: whatever they believe is secondary to how well or how poorly they act. If one person believes "treat others well because Jesus says so," while another person believes "treat others well because Krishna says so," wouldn't they then both agree with each other that the over-riding priority here is to treat others well? How much "should" it really matter WHO says so?

I've often heard people make the following argument about the n-word. It is self-defeating to insist that it is offensive for people, especially white people, to use the n-word. This taboo is precisely what empowers the word and makes it harmful; if we let people say it freely, it will lose its effect, which is what those concerned about racial invective should really want. I was wondering if the panelists are convinced by this theory of the meaning of the n-word and slurs more generally.

Acts of "kindness": I do things in my life for others like; hold doors, pick up liter and carry groceries. I have been under the assumption that I was doing these things for others. After making this a way of life, I find myself feeling guilty when I don't pick up trash or hold the door for someone. So my question is: Are my actions as well intentioned and selfless as I once believed or do I do those things to feed my ego to make myself think I am a good person? This has really got me thinking about my motivations for "doing the right thing". Am I secretly trying to make the unconscious case for my moral/socital superiority? Thanks for listening. Kai

Ethics of procreation: Consider a scientist that could grow humans knowing that two thirds of them would die after suffering short lives of terror and extreme deprivation, but one third of the lives he could produce in this manner would survive to a productive adult life. We would think that if he were to create extremely bad lives rather than good lives, he would be committing Mengalian atrocities, or at least, that is what I think the general intuition would be. But there are conditions in which people procreate knowing that their children will suffer short and extremely bad lives, in subsistence conditions, where two thirds of the children they produce will suffer in this way. To ensure the two cases are analogous, suppose that the scientist creates these lives only to ensure his genetic continuation, his security in old age, or out of economic necessity, and will stop producing lives only when he has two viable children to support him and work in his lab. Can one context of procreation be plausibly...

People always say that one's action should not be aimed at disabling others to take their own actions, and the former is often subject of general denouncement. For example, when a pianist plays piano in his neighborhood at midnight and disturbs another person's sleep, people would say that playing piano is more of a disturbance than sleeping, and so one should avoid playing piano when someone else is sleeping. What is the intrinsic difference between the two? Cannot I say that the sleeping makes it inconvenient for the pianist to play piano, and so one should not sleep when someone else is playing piano? What is the logical basis of making any of such judgements?

My question regards the notion of negative rights. Personally, I believe the notion of “rights” is itself a human creation, and that rights do not ultimately exist outside of this creation. Rights come from nowhere else but humans. This being the case would seem to imply that all rights would, by definition, be positive, even if means determining a right not to do something. Humans desicion-making process itself entails deciding to do, or not to do something, or allowing, or not allowing something to be done, all of which have been positively decided. What am I not understanding?

Do we have moral duties towards institutions (like the Red Cross)? Do institutions have moral rights?

I'm told it's arguable that when people say, "Water is H20", what they mean is, "The stuff from around here that we call water has the molecular structure H2O." Well, what about ethical claims? When people say "Killing is wrong", do they really mean "Killing is wrong in all circumstances, times and places"? Or are they saying something more like, "According to the normal values from around here, killing is wrong"?

Dear philosophers, I've been told that instead of looking for objective moral facts, many philosophers see the task of ethics as bringing intuitions into "reflective equilibrium". But if intuitions aren't a sort of sixth sense that allows people to perceive moral facts, and are merely behavioural tendencies from nature and nurture, why ought we try to systematise them? What special authority do they have, and why duree action viagra should we care about them?

Hello. I wanted to ask about revenge. (1) Is there anything morally wrong with taking revenge? (2) If the urge to take revenge is a genetic instinct (and surely, it's quite plausible that it might be), why should it have less moral authority than any other feeling about right and wrong? The background to this question is that, while there's no explicit eye-for-an-eye in the laws of most contemporary societies, usually judges take community expectations and appropriate punishment into account when sentencing, and not just factors like legal requirements, precedence, rehabilitation and deterrence -- so revenge is arguably still very much a part of modern law.