My aunt once complained about how the dumb the janitor of my high school was. He didn't seem very bright to me either. But, why do people think it's okay to put others down just because they are dumb? I am warranted in having less respect for my aunt for being that way or is it hypocritical to be judgmental to people who are judgmental?

The Golden Rule, at least in its usual formulation, would seem to be problematic in cases of justice. If a judge were to "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", then they would probably never sentence anybody. A teacher couldn't fail a student who tried very hard because, presumably, that teacher (at least as a student) would have preferred a barely passing grade if they had tried very hard. The only way around this seems to be for people to enthusiastically and voluntarily be willing to punish themselves, which seems a bit of a stretch, to say the least; at most, people recognize that some system of rules requires they be punished and, perhaps, that system has a point, but nobody really *wants* to be punished. So how do proponents of the Golden Rule deal with such cases? Must they search elsewhere for their justification, or do they change the scope or meaning of the Golden Rule?

I'm a rising senior economics major, and I'm trying to make a decision about my career. I want to do as much good as possible, but I'm not sure how to estimate how much good I would produce in different careers. I've researched the evidence-based approaches that some philanthropic foundations use (e.g., the "impact planning" of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), but their formulas, etc. don't seem generalizable to calculating an individual's marginal impact. For example, maybe it makes sense to donate a lot to global health but not pursue a career in it because there are already so many working in development. Right now I'm assuming that anything really important will eventually be achieved, so any contribution I make will consist of just coming up with an idea/implementing a project sooner than it would have otherwise. So how about this formula: (N * T / L) * Q Where N is the number of people in the population I'm targeting, T is how much sooner I come up with an idea/implement (e.g., a year sooner than someone else), L is the average lifespan of a person in the population (making T / L the extra fraction of a targeted person's life in which they benefit from the contribution and N * T / L the adjusted number of lives I'm affecting), and Q is the percentage increase in the goodness of the person's life, making N * T / L * Q the number of quality-adjusted lives I'm helping. So if a U.S. education program is implemented a year earlier because of me, there are 50m students, and this increases the quality of a student's life by 1%, is my impact: (50m * 1 / 80) * 1% = 6,250? All this seems confused, but I can't think of a better formula! Please help!!!

Animal welfare regulations require that pain killers be administered to experimental animals subjected to painful experimental procedures even if the animal is subsequently killed. From the point of the animal, is there any utility in this requirement? Assume that there is no utility if the animal is killed immediately after the pain since it will no longer have a memory of the pain when it is dead. Then, it would seem the regulations are misguided (if their intent is only to protect the animal) and it would be ethical to not administer a pain killer. With this assumption, is there some interval in which it would become unethical? If it is concluded that it is impossible to define an interval since for every interval the animal would no longer have a memory of the pain at the end of the interval when it is dead. If this is the case, then would it always be ethically acceptable not to administer pain killers, since all animals will die eventually.

Can empathy cause people to be immoral? Like if you empathize with a criminals motives will that lead you to excusing them?

'Normal' people don't do very bad things (murder, rape, etc), so if someone does something bad, can't we assume that the person is sick rather than evil? Why is it that people with mental disabilities, people with addictions, etc. can use that as their excuse and usually get people to pity them while other "crazy" people don't get any pity whatsoever and instead get thrown into prison for the rest of their lives?

Why are insults that refer to a person's personality, lifestyle or hobbies considered more acceptable (or at least less serious) than insults to a person's race, sex or disability? I used to think that it was because personality, lifestyle and hobbies are mutable, whereas race, sex and disability are things a person has no control over - yet there are plenty of examples to the contrary (Many personalities don't change without outside intervention; transsexuals change their physiological sex; disabilities can be the result of one's own voluntary actions; Micheal Jackson went white; etc.). Not only that, but why should it matter whether or not a person has control over the things being made fun of? I only see two possibilities. First, it could be a question of fairness - in which case, why is it fair to insult things that a person can change but that are nevertheless a part of them as human beings? This brings me to the second possibility - maybe we are implicitly endorsing a norm like "If the insults bother you, change yourself." Yet this seems horrendously unfair and authoritarian. So why does society accept insults to or disrespect of a person based on their personality (shyness, clumsiness, taste in the arts, etc.), their lifestyle (polyamorists, hippies, S/M practitioners, etc.) or their hobbies (painting miniature soldiers, playing video games, carrying dogs around in their purses)?

When a women dresses "slutty" and is raped people are usually divided between two camps. The blame can either be placed solely on the perpetrators or some would argue that the women is also to blame for getting into the situation. While admittedly I fall into the second camp, I don't quite understand why a victim can't be at least partially to blame for his/her situation. Can't people be blamed for creating a situation in which a crime is more likely or will happen? If I supply terrorists with nuclear weapons, and millions die. Yet I didn't kill anyone and the terrorists who did had a choice to disarm the weapon. Yet most people would agree that I would be sharing the blame. If I encourage racism by wearing a "hate blacks" T shirt and speaking in white supremacist rallies do I share any of the blame for the mistreatment of minorities? (Equally am I to blame if I am attacked by black gangs?) Ultimately if a women dresses "slutty" and is raped, can't she be blamed for encouraging the situation? I'm interested in the panel's views.

I'm a psychology student with a question about ethics: Is empathy ESSENTIAL to morality. Could a person without the capacity for empathy still be a morally good person? (Note that I am not asking whether empathy is morally useful.) Psychopaths are often described as lacking empathy, and this is often offered up as an explanation for their immoral behavior, so one might be tempted to use them as evidence that empathy is necessary for morality. This, however, strikes me as a bit fast and loose because in addition to emotional deficiencies, psychopaths also show a remarkable lack or underdevelopment of practical reason. It may also be worth asking whether empathy can be used in immoral ways. A skilled torturer, for instance, might be a more effective torturer if she or he can accurately channel, measure, and thus manipulate the emotional pain of a victim. Or con artists may use empathy to better read a mark, and so on. One might counter that when we empathize, we further react with some degree of care or sympathy. But this also seems inaccurate. Sympathy, for instance, seems to involve a kind of well-wishing for the other. It is a third person emotion that involves feeling something for another; feeling what another ought to feel, but may not actually feel. Empathy on the other hand is a first person emotion; a kind of tuning-in to the emotional of another, feeling what they do feel, rather than what they should feel. Is this kind of emotion essential for morality? Can it hinder morality? Would we be better off, or necessarily immoral without it? (Also, is this a common question in moral philosophy?)

Dear Philosophers, I have been dating a woman for one year. She's been away studying at a university in another country for the last few months, but is coming back soon. All the time we've been together, she's had some problems that I think were depression. But now she's become worse, so that it's having a big impact on her daily life. She's getting treatment abroad, but attitudes towards and treatment of mental health problems are terrible back here. Our conversations together are no fun at all - we only talk about her daily problems, which I can't help with at all. I feel like this is all too much for me. But I also feel (1) I have a responsibility to help her through this, (2) she might commit suicide if I left her, (3) that it would be callous to give up faith in her getting better. For my own sake, I think I should break up, but I don't know how much weight to give to the above three concerns.