Could someone elaborate on Nietzsche criticism of shame. In particular when he says 'What is most human about you? - To spare someone shame." I recognize the connection between this, and the falling tightrope walker in the part one of _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_, and that he falls because the buffoon shames him. I conclude from this that Nietzsche means to shame someone is to point them away from the path towards the overman. This, coupled with his belief that admitting you are wrong, even when you are right, is a good thing, leads to the idea that humouring someone, allowing them to persist in false ideas, which could do them harm, is the good thing to do. Does he mean then that we shouldn't correct people in their mistakes for fear of shaming them? This seems at odds with the purpose and practice of philosophy.

Dear Friend, You have pointed out perhaps my most favorite Nietzsche quote. It's from The Gay Science : "What do you consider the most humane? - To spare someone shame. What is the seal of liberation? - To no longer be ashamed in front of oneself." I have told many people, including my students, that if I ever got a tattoo it would be this quote! I still don't have the tat' but I stand by the claim. I don't think he is saying anything about not calling people out when they are wrong. He is the first one to do the calling, after all. Instead I think FN is worried about the totalizing sense of shame that overtakes some people - particularly during his time and place. We are talking about an era where even piano legs had to have a sense of modesty! The problem is that feeling shame is it can be like saying "No" to life. It is the opposite of vitality, of moral and intellectual adventure. Someone who is ashamed of himself will never take a risk nor do anything bold for fear of further...

Some time ago, a question was asked: "How do you think technology will affect the teaching and practice of philosophy." The responses, while interesting, were a little too pragmatic. So, I would like to reformulate and ask a parallel question: How do you think technology will affect teaching and learning in the 21st century? Is the technological classroom the next great revolution? Or is it all hype, rhetoric, and advertising spin? Can philosophy help guide us in sorting the useful from the useless, the time wasting, and cost incurring technologies? Plato/Socrates was uncertain about print, Heidegger warned that in asking "the question about technology" that we are on the wrong track ... So, what advice would philosophers give to teachers trying to negotiate the validity of the technological revolution for teaching. George

Dear George, I don't have too much of my own to add (but see below). Really, I wanted to recommend to you the work of philosopher Neil Postman. He was the go-to philosopher on the issue of technology and citizenry. You might want to start by looking up his lecture called "Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Change." Currently there is a link to it here: http://www.mat.upm.es/~jcm/neil-postman--five-things.html - not sure how stable that link is. You can also find out more about Postman and his books at http://neilpostman.org/ -- but I am not sure who owns that website. Good luck, I think you will enjoy Postman. P.S. I agree that philosophy generally has been cautious about technology. But perhaps contemporary philosophers have special reason to be cautious: philosophical enterprises that make use of technology quickly break out to become their own (better funded) fields - as in the case of psychology, physics, cognitive science, etcetera. P.P.S As to the issue of...

Is it possible to choose the one we fall in love with? It seems to me that the experience of falling in love is a purely undecided matter. For instance, there have been many cases and personally to me wherein one would just wake up with a feeling that he is in love with someone even though that possibility may not have occurred to him before. He did not deliberately choose the person, so to speak. His emotions seems to have told him that he is indeed in love. Can this really be possible? Or would we call it really love? And thanks to this site. You all are very generous in sharing your knowledge and expertise.

My amorous friend, I had the good luck recently to spend some time reading the philosopher Robert Solomon. He has written many books on the subject of emotions. About Love is a particularly good one that addresses just the kind of question you raise. His prose is accessible, and you will find both deep wisdom and folksy common sense there. I recommend this book especially for you. So my answer here is not original in any way, but relies heavily on Solomon's views. What I get out of his work is that we frequently rely on the metaphors (falling in love, struck by Cupid's arrows, thunderbolts) and on the feelings (dumb-struck, possessed, overwhelmed) to understand love, but over reliance on these metaphors and feelings may obscure certain truths about love. Love - like all emotions - is a sort of judgment. We deliberate. We decide. We commit -- to love! How marvelous! If we allow love or other emotions to be seen as 'passions' which overwhelm us we give up our responsibility for our...

As a vegetarian, when I consider the prospect of having a child I must ask myself whether to bring her up on the same diet as mine. I have met people who resentfully continue to be vegetarians because their parents brought them up that way and they could never ingest meat properly. Is it fair for parents to treat a child in this way and would you answer that question differently if the majority of adults, but not children, had freely chosen to be vegetarians and were now asking themselves the same question?

Hello My Veggie Friend, This is a question that also puzzles me. I am not sure if fairness is the central issue. Let's deal with the resentful vegetarians who continue with the program because they 'cannot ingest meat properly.' My understanding is that born-and-raise vegetarians can adapt to a meat diet. They will encounter some initial stomach upset, but this will go away in short order. From a nutritional point of view, someone raised vegetarian could make the switch. From a moral and psychological point of view, the change will be much more difficult. I don't know why you personally are a vegetarian. For me, I eventually became convinced when I read the classic article "Eating Meat and Eating People," by the fabulously smart Cora Diamond. I won't try to recount her views here precisely, but what I took away from the article was simply that people become committed to vegetarianism when their concepts of food no longer includes animals. I suspect the resentful vegetarians you describe...

I am doing a project for my philosophy class. When I google search for the ethically legitimate function of civil servants, I am finding zero. I am curious to find out if the code of conduct that civil servants follow applies to all professions (if there has every been just one code of conduct), also have these codes of conduct ever been revised. With more cultures and religious beliefs coming into play in society I am wondering if this has been addressed at all? Thank-You for your time, Becky J.

Dear Becky, This sounds like a good project. I have some suggestions. First, you might want to change your research strategy. Instead of google, I would take advantage of your academic library. Part of your tuition goes to fund library subscriptions to databases, such as EBSCO or Lexus-Nexus. These databases have tons of academic journals, featuring articles that have been vetted by professional philosophers (or economists or what-have-you). Google, on the other hand, will punch up whatever is popular. So my first recommendation is to go the database route because it might help you on the theory end of civil servant ethics. My second idea is to do practical research on your local or state government. I know my state (New Jersey) is so renown for ethics violations by civil servants that there is a major push for ethics reform. In our case here, all state employees must watch a one hour power point presentation on professional ethics. I personally have vowed not to steal yellow...

How can someone know that a question has an answer before knowing what the answer is? Or more specifically how is it possible that someone can place parameters on the possible answer faster than they can produce that answer?

This is a very nice question because what you are asking speaks to the heart of all inquiry, not just philosophical: How will I know I have the answer to a question if I truly don't know what the answer is? The logician might say you are asking about the difference between testing for local sufficiency and then global sufficiency (and I am borrowing heavily from my favorite critical thinking textbook, which is Susan Gardner's Thinking Your Way to Freedom ). Here is how the local vs. global sufficiency falsification works. First, throw out possible answers that are obviously wrong. What counts as obviously wrong? Let's say answers that are obviously wrong are those answers which don't fit the facts, or don't match the truth of the world. This is the first (local) step in falsification. Next, look at what remains - you may still have a few possible answers on the table. The one of these which seems the least wrong is likely your best answer. This is the global sufficiency test. When you say,...

Why do my parents tell me it is morally wrong to have a "hickey" or love bite on my neck. I am in a socially recognized relationship. Both of us are above the age of sexual consent in our country [several years above]. Neither of us are religious. Neither of us care about the judgment of the rest of the world. No one can see the mark, when my hair covers it. I am not in a professional setting that requires me to uphold any dress code or manner of behavior. I would just like to know what is so wrong about acknowledging that we enjoy giving pleasure to each other. Why is it morally wrong to have passion, and reciprocated enjoyment. Maybe we would be a less uptight society if we spent more time trying to find ways to bring people enjoyment and less time worrying about upholding some sort of stilted Victorian morality. Perhaps he takes umbrage to the fact that I, a woman, am enjoying sex? After all, it should be done for reproductive purposes only, in the dark, with only the man enjoying himself. Can...

Greetings, My Daring Friend! I wonder if the word 'wrong' is what is tripping everyone up. There are of course several nuances to wrong. It's wrong to text while driving (wrong = dangerous as well as illegal); it is wrong to end a long-time friendship for frivolous reasons (wrong = rash and inconsiderate and foolish); it's wrong to wear "mom jeans" (wrong = embarrassingly out of style). When it comes to sporting love bites, I am not convinced the wrong committed by you rises to the level of a full-fledged moral wrong. It certainly is wrong in the sense that it violates a social norm of appropriateness, the norm being that evidence of sexual satisfaction should only be flaunted by rockstars. But social norms about what is appropriate are deeply important and they can't be dismissed too quickly or cavalierly. They are the expectations of behavior, and each of us must make an account of ourselves. When someone flaunts such a norm - particularly one to do with sex - there will be a price to...

I recently found out that a cousin of mine, about 15, is being brainwashed by his parents into accepting all sorts of religious dogma and nonsense. Now, personally I don't have anything against religion in principle, and I even think the Intelligent Design argument is, well, intelligent (or at least clever). But for a 15 year old to be indoctrinated like that bothers me. Is there anything I can say (or books I can recommend to him) to him that would not be insensitive to him or his family but would at least get him thinking about things in a slightly more independent manner? Thanks!

I believe you when you say you don't give a fig what educational agenda is being pushed on the cousin. I think your objection speaks to a long standing debate in the philosophy of education: just where is that line between indoctrination and education? The purpose of an education is to help you to lead an autonomous life. Autonomy, simply put, is the ability to govern your own life: to make decisions about the kind of life you would like to have, and then implement the necessary steps to get there. (Note: autonomy is not about being a lone wolf!) Good religious or spiritual education will produce people who make spiritual decisions genuinely and autonomously. We stray into indoctrination (or cultishness, or brain-washing) when we pervert the process of education to deliberately reduce autonomy. Cults, for example, reduce their members' autonomy by making them afraid of leaving (as in "If you leave us, you will have nothing!"). Good spiritual education, on the other hand, says, "If you leave us, we...

The common pro-life argument against abortion is that the killing of an innocent person is always murder, and that all fetuses are innocent people; therefore, all abortions are murder…but who’s to say that either premise is correct? I’m willing to accept the latter, but I question the former. I think I can give a few examples of when killing innocent people is not murder. A car accident: somebody jumps out in front of your vehicle and you hit them. Collateral damage in a war: in 1990 coalition forces accidently bombed a bunker full of civilians. I believe they killed 2,000 people in this single raid and that many were women and children, but we don’t call THAT murder. I could go on. So, I ask: Is it always murder to kill an innocent person?

First, let's dispatch with the abortion argument you mentioned. This is a classic example of a 'begging the question' argument. (So classic it appears in tons of logic texts!) The reason why it is question-begging is because whether or not a fetus is a person is exactly what is under debate in the abortion controversy. By assuming the very point they are looking to prove, proponents of this argument commit the sin of begging the question. Your problem is a bit different, and more interesting. You are wondering if the seemingly attractive premise "killing innocent people is always murder, and therefore is always wrong" is actually worth much. All of your examples seem to be cases of killing innocents by accident. (Whether war is ever an accident is a question we can [sigh] leave aside.) I think it is reasonable to say that killing someone by accident is not murder, though it may be grossly negligent and blame-worthy. You want to define murder as killing another, with the malicious intention...

What qualifies one as a philosopher? I use a number of tools (reason, ethics, etc) to philosophize, and I can even use a smattering of philosophical terminology, but I would hardly consider myself a philosopher, though I suppose one could call me philosophical... in short, even if we can't all be Nietzsche (mercifully, most would say), are we all not philosophers (some admittedly better or worse than others, of course)? Or must one have gone through a certain process to be deemed so?

You likely already know the root of the word philosopher: lover of wisdom. We could stick with just a simple, stripped down understanding of who philosophers are as lovers of wisdom. Anybody who loves wisdom would then qualify. 'Ah ha!,' you say, 'but what is wisdom?' Uncle, uncle - I give up! So I grant you the old school definition doesn't get us very far. Philosophical questions are basically questions for which there are no ultimate, permanent answers. I would say 'philosopher' should include anyone who wants to give such questions serious study, be it formally (at university) or informally (philosophy cafe groups, book clubs, or leisure reading). By the way, there is a certain snob-appeal to the title 'philosopher.' The qualifications of academic philosophy have given philosophy an especially rarified air, and perhaps that is another reason why people shy away from (or seem pretentious in) claiming the title. Some of Europe's most famous philosophers wouldn't be 'qualified' as...

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