Are we born with morality, a distinct human sense of right and wrong, or is our morality merely a product of our environment?

If love of others is taken to be a supreme value is there any ethical justification for a mature (50+) married man and woman to love each other when they are not married to each other (adultery) assuming children are not at risk (grown and gone or don't exist) and that great care is taken to keep the relationship secret and private (assume both live in distant countries/cultures)? Assume neither pregnancy nor disease are issues. Assume both people live in passionless but stable and friendly situations and recognize legitimate needs of all concerned to social and financial stability. Both divorcing would likely cause much pain and disruption to many. Terminating the relationship would deny both their last chance of expressing their mutual affection, of sharing their highest value. From at least Aristotle on, and for most religions and cultures, adultery is a no brainer - wrong without question. With aging populations in a modern context this question will become more common. If it is wrong, how...

Here is an attack on vegetarianism: Is it better for an animal to exist or not to exist? If it were better for it not to exist, wouldn't it be a virtue sterilising all the animals out there, so that no more come into an unfortunate existence? This would seem absurd. Thus let us conclude that in some cases it is better for an animal to exist. Now the cows, for example, on a farm only exist because someone will eat them later. Assuming also that the cow is kept in humane conditions, and has all the things a cow would want in life, we might conclude that it is better that the cow has been. As this good is wholly dependant on a human being a meat-eater, we conclude that it is virtuous being a meat-eater.

As a teacher I am concerned about the aftermath of the killings at Virginia Tech. Many have said that we teachers should be responsible for monitoring the content of our students' writing assignments, and that we should notify the authorities if we identify any particular student as repeatedly making statements that are disturbing, violent, or indicating mental illness. How would a philosopher approach this topic? What are the ethical issues involved in monitoring students' thoughts via their personal writing, which is handed in for course credit?

People often talk about 'being good' when they refuse a piece of cake or go to the gym, and feel guilty when they don't. But is there any moral virtue in imposing dietary or other restrictions on oneself in order to maintain or improve physical fitness or appearance?

Does the study or the practice of Social Work raise interesting philosophical questions? If it does, would these questions be placed only in branches "more practical" like political philosophy and ethics, or also in branches "less practical" like epistemology and philosophy of science? There could be a "philosophy of social work", or would it have to be a smaller point in other discipline?

Anyone presently in college probably knows students who have take drugs like Adderall to help them study (I should add that whether all of these actually suffer from ADD is often doubtful). Should this be considered unethical? There's an obvious comparison between drug-use of this sort and steroid-use in professional sports, but I've always been suspicious of this analogy.

Do I need to have a 'greater authority' to know that murder is wrong? I don't believe in god. But I believe that murder is wrong. What is my logical reason to hold to rules that I don't 'need' to be bound to?

The concept of a homunculus suggests that there is an inner core in each of us, a "self" that makes functional and moral decisions. The emerging sciences of complex adaptive theory and network theory suggest there is no homunculus in complex living systems (from cells to the global economy). An identifiable self has not been located by neurobiologists and may never be located. The self appears to be a composite of many internal systems that interact with many external systems. If we cannot locate the self, if there is no homunculus to point to as the agent of a "good" or "bad" decision, if people are more than the sum total of their parts and cannot be reduced to a single part (such as the self), does morality still exist? That is, does the concept of morality exists if there is no concept of the self?

What is the relationship between philosophy and ethics?