Is it morally justifiable to joke about serious crimes like rape? Humor can be a coping mechanism for people to deal with something so reprehensible, while at the same time acknowledging that it is a serious and immoral crime. Yet it's possible that for rapists or potential rapists, seeing how some parts of the community treat the crime so light-heartedly might mitigate their moral qualms about committing rape. Are there some things which we just shouldn't joke about?

Doesn't moral goodness depend on our definition of moral goodness? For example, if we define "Good are those actions which upholds God's will, as in the Bible", our moral views are likely to be very different to those of people who define good as "Those actions which help, and do not hinder, others in achieving their own peaceful ends". Yet how can we arbitrate between different definitions of the good? There are actions which uphold God's will, as presented in the Bible, and there are actions which help, and do not hinder, others in achieving their own peaceful ends, so how do we decide which of these groups of actions gets the label "good"?

I always wondered at Socrates' idea that if you know that a certain way to live or that certain actions are evil, you couldn't do them. I know people do things, and later regret them. And that means that have some knowledge after the fact that if they had had before would have made it impossible to do what they regret. And that we can rationalize almost anything to keep ourselves from knowing exactly what we are doing. But doesn't, say, Macbeth know that what he is doing is evil, and does it anyway? Are there any good arguments for Socrates?

Is there such a thing as "emotional infidelity"?

Some acts become morally wrong only due to the victim's knowledge of them. (For example, in an answer on Feb. 16, Charles Taliaferro says "internet stalking" is wrong because "the people you are studying so closely would not want this, should they ever know about it.") What is the moral status of such an act if the victim doesn't find out about it? In case that sounds too obscure, here are two other examples (from real life): 1. Ogling: if a man looks at a woman and feels attracted to her (but does not say or do anything), and she finds him repulsive, she would feel that she had been wronged if she knew about his attraction, but has no way to know about it. 2. Jewish law requires a group of 10 Jews to worship (defined as people whose mothers were Jewish). I know a non-Jew (Jewish father only) who tricked a group of 9 orthodox Jews by claiming to be Jewish and praying with them. If they knew he wasn't Jewish by their standards, they would have been harmed, but they had no way to find out. In the ogling case, one commits a wrong merely by thinking, but the Judaism case is a matter of outward behavior. In all cases, it is the victims' knowledge of the crime that causes the harm. One might be tempted to say these acts are wrong because the victim might find out, but it's easy to construct situations where this couldn't happen--say, the victims are strangers whom the perpetrator will never meet again. I'm very curious what philosophers have to say about this.

Dear philosophers, I have a question concerning politics and movies. Do people who boycott movies involving a certain actor/director/producer simply on the basis of the political views of that actor/director/producer acting reasonably? I wouldn't think so because a large part of how people decide whether to watch a movie or not is the history of the quality of the actor/director/producer's work and not that actor/director/producer's political views. What do you philosophers think?

I have a habit of "stalking" people I'm interested in on the internet. I'll Google their names for information about their past, ferret out photos of them on Facebook and other sites, and so on. I don't invade their privacy in any real sense, at least insofar as the pictures and information I seek out is publicly available. But I still feel bad about it, and I have this sense that what I'm doing is somehow disrespectful to the person I've become fixated on. (Relatedly, I'm sure that if others found me engaged in such activities, they'd find it at least a little off-putting or creepy.) At the same time, it isn't clear to me that anyone is actually getting hurt by any of this, so I have a hard time explaining my unease in any precise way. Is there anything morally wrong with the sort of thing I've described, and if so, what is it exactly?

Can I a sociopath be held morally responsible for his/her crimes? Is there any literature written on the subject of ethics in relation with those who lack empathy for others (or psychopaths who have uncontrollable urges to kill)?

The golden rule teaches that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto you. To what aspects of life does the golden rule apply to? If a person believes that they would never ask for charity no matter how dire their situation justified according to the golden rule in not giving money to charity? Is it possible that an exaggerated belief in ones self-sufficiency is simply a way to hypocritically evade the demands of the golden rule?

I'm interested whether technological advancement can ever be morally good, and under what circumstances. It's a platitude to say that technology has both positive and negative effects (on the one hand, creature comforts, better health, cheaper goods and services; on the other hand, pollution, weapons, cultural homogenization, etc.) But, given the psychological evidence for "hedonic adaptation" (people quickly return to the same baseline level of happiness no matter what happens to them) and economic evidence such as the "Easterlin paradox" (average reported happiness of a country's citizens does not increase with average income), it seems unlikely that the supposedly positive effects of technology are genuinely good--especially those related to material prosperity. The supposedly negative effects may not be so bad either, but it's definitely not obvious that the good outweighs the bad, as people generally assume. Even if technology is neutral overall rather than bad, we probably shouldn't accept any degree of environmental destruction for its sake (though we currently accept some), nor should governments ever encourage technological advancement at the expense of other goals (which they do). And it would be morally wrong for a person to choose a job that advances technology over one that serves some better goal. There are a few specific technological advancements that seem completely good, like the invention of drugs to treat depression (since these make people unquestionably happier). But all technologies, and especially pure scientific discoveries, have unforeseeable consequences, so what seems good now may turn monstrous in the future. (For example, G.H. Hardy ironically declared that number theory and relativity would never have any military applications, a few years before the atomic bomb.) As a computer programmer, I'd like to think that I'm not doing something morally wrong by aiding the advance of technology. Indeed, most people who work in technology and science take it as obvious that all technological advancement is good. But the evidence seems to suggest otherwise. So, are there any defensible arguments that technological progress is actually morally good, especially ones that take into account the considerations above? I realize this is a big question, so I'd also appreciate any recommendations for further reading on this topic.