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Ethics
Music

Putting aside the legal aspects and ramifications of illegally downloading music - is doing so morally wrong? Put another way, do we do something morally wrong when we download or otherwise take music that we did not pay for? If we acknowledge a private right to property, and that taking someone's property is stealing, then, can we say we steal (in the same sense, which is to say with the same moral implications) when we take the recognized intellectual property of another, specifically some artist's or artists' music?

The notion of "intellectual property" is fraught with difficulty, and my first reaction to this kind of argument is to question whether there is any such thing. Indeed, there are intelligent and thoughtful people who do precisely that. See, for example, this post by Richard Stallman. But one does not have to go that far to think, as many more people do, that copyright (and especially patent) law has gotten completely out of hand. Most people seem to think that copyrights and patents exist to protect the rights of the creator of the work in question. This is questionable. One might hold instead that they exist to further society's interest in encouraging creativity and innovation, and that the laws governing so-called "intellectual property" ought to based upon an understanding that this is, indeed, the sole legitimate purpose of such laws. So, if we value the creation and production of music and wish to encourage it, we would do well to think about what a sustainable and rational ...
Abortion

Suppose a woman hates to fold laundry and is some sort of embryological neuroscientist. The woman conceives a child and takes a potion she has developed at an early stage before the embryo is conscious and when abortion is currently permissible such that when the child is born, the child has no desires other to fold laundry and put it away. The child is a sort of willing laundry slave. Let us suppose that the child is incapable of having any other desires than to do laundry and is incapable of being happy doing anything else. In fact, the child is completely happy in this state of laundry slavery. I have the intuition that the embryo is harmed at the moment the potion is taken even though the child who is born is incapable of objecting. If it is morally wrong to deny the embryo of its future freedom at the point when the potion is taken, why is it okay to deny the embryo of its future life at that same point through an abortion? The existence of future person who is harmed doesn't seem to matter in...

Different people will have different views about this, but I think the obvious thing to say is this. Taking the potion you described harms a person who will one day exist. Having an abortion does not harm a person who will one day exist. So that is the difference: In the one case, a person is harmed, but not in the other. That person does not exist at the time the harm is done, but I think you are correct that the person does not need to exist at that time to be harmed. To see the importance of this, note that a similar case can be described even if the woman takes the potion before any child is conceived. In that case, no independent life exists at all, and yet it seems as if taking the potion is morally objectionable, for much the same reason. There are complications here, surrounding the idea that the woman's behavior is wrong even if no child is ever conceived, on the ground that she risked harming someone. But I'll leave it to you, and others, to work this out. One important point is...
Ethics

What's so bad about Holocaust denial?

Well, the first thing that's bad about it is that it flies in the face of the obvious evidence. But that's not what you meant, presumably. Merely believing something false isn't usually held to be morally objectionable, the way Holocaust denial is. So why is that morally objectionable? Well, I think we have to look at the moral surroundings. People who deny the fact of the Holocaust are not normally historians with a detached interest in the matter. Holocaust deniers do not have good, independent reason to think things are other than the rest of us believe. Rather, they want there not to have been a Holocaust, or for it not to have been as bad as is usually thought, and so they flatly disregard the obvious evidence or invent reasons to discount it. So one thing one might say is that those who deny the Holocaust (almost?) always have an ulterior motive, and it's not so much the denial itself that is problematic as the motives behind it. Indeed, I don't myself see that there would be anything...
Ethics

This is a difficult question to ask. But does the fact that Hitler had what could be described as noble intentions - he wanted to make the world what he thought would be a better place - in some way mitigate the moral repugnance of his actions?

I don't know if it mitigates it, but I think it's important to understand that, even people who do things as horrific as what Hitler did, very often do not think of themselves as doing anything wrong. Maybe Hitler is a bad example, as he is known to have been pretty nuts, but take Osama bin Laden. From what I've read, he is often described as quite charming and intelligent, and for all I know he's very kind to his various wives and children, generous to strangers, and so forth. But the dude has an axe to grind, and he thinks of himself as justified in grinding it. As for the innocents who die, collateral damage, you know? Or maybe they're not all so innocent, really. And what of the people in the United States who condoned and even encouraged torture? They clearly didn't think they were doing anything wrong, and yet what they did was horrendously wrong. Vice President Cheney, so far as I am concerned, is guilty of war crimes, and he ought to be tried, convicted, and imprisoned forthwith. And yet,...
Logic

What do derivation systems in a formal logical language tell us about logic? Or about the propositions in the proof? Are their purpose only to show us that a particular proof or argument can be demonstrated using that particular language? IN other words, why do we have derivations in formal logic ... what is their grand purpose?

Peter always gets to these before I do. I agree with what he says, but will add a couple points. First, modern logic emerges in the work of Gottlob Frege, one of whose contributions was the first formal system of logic. Frege is explicit about his motivations. Here's a passage from his paper "On Mr Peano's Conceptual Notation and My Own", from 1897: "I became aware of the need for a concpetual notation [formal language] when I was looking for the fundamental principles upon which the whole of mathematics rests. ...For an investigation such as I have in mind here, it is not sufficient just for us to convince ourselves of the truth of a conclusion, as we are usually content to do in mathematics; on the contrary, we must also be made aware of what it is that justifies our conviction, and upon what primitive laws it is based. For this are required fixed guiding-lines, along which the deductions are to run; and in verbal languages these are not provided. If we try to list all the laws governing the...
Logic

I always assumed that there could be no contradictions -- that the principle of non-contradiction was absolute, so to say. Recently, however, I read about dialetheism and paraconsistent logic and realized that some philosophers disagreed. It seems all of logic falls apart if contradictions are permitted. I fail to understand how their position makes any sense (which could admittedly be just a failure on my part). So is it possible someone could better explain their viewpoint? Surely none of them believe that, say, one could simultaneously open and close a book, right?

So far as I know, no "dialethists" believe that all contradictions are true. But there is a significant disagreement about whether it's just weird cases, like the liar, that give rise to contradictions, or whether there might be contradictions that are in some sense observable. Graham Priest thinks there are; moderates like J.C. Beall think there aren't. The case of simultaneously opening and closing a book leads naturally to issues about vagueness. It's natural to think that it's vague whether a book is closed. Take an obviously closed book and then "open" it a nanometer. Surely a nanometer can't make a difference to whether the book is closed, can it? (If you think it can, try a picometer. Or something even smaller.) But then, lots of nanometers add up to a centimeter, which surely can make a difference. So, a dialethist might say, if we take a "borderline case", that will be a case where the book is both open and closed. (If you're inclined instead to say that it's a case where it's neither open...
Philosophy
Profession
Value

How do philosophers (or academics in general) justify their choice of profession? How is it defensible to be studying esoteric ideas with relatively few (if any) implications for the greater good, rather than devoting one's life to solving the much more practical problems that burden so much of the world's population? I realize that some philosophical ideas have had important worldwide impacts and have directly improved people's lives, but I doubt that almost any philosophers working today would say that that's what they expect to come out of their analyzing a particular view of Wittgenstein's or whatever. (I think this question ought to be asked of most professions, but it seems that philosophers would be thinking about this sort of thing much more so than would, say, investment bankers.)

I'm too tired to answer this directly. But if I had nothing else to say, I'd insist that art---painting, sculpture, music---has as little "direct" contribution to make as does philosophy, and I'm quite convinced of the importance of art to human flourishing. So perhaps the answer should be, "Man does not live by bread alone". Which is not, of course, to say that bread isn't important.
Law
Religion

During the 2004 Presidential Debate between George W. Bush and John Kerry campaign a young female college student asked John Kerry about abortion and his political position on this issue. Kerry responded first by asserting that he is a Roman Catholic and that he did not endorse or feel good about the practice; but he added that he also believed that “articles of faith”, by which I presume he meant a religious belief about the moral status of abortion, are not matters of legislation or law (a position I fundamentally agree with). Kerry’s response seems to assume that morality, or at least morality based on religion, should not be a part of law; however, it also appears to me that it is difficult to imagine where law would derive its power if not from some kind of (religious?) moral basis. I have been trying to see how Kerry’s comment is intelligible in light of the dilemma of how laws would have any kind of power, or that there would be any justification for their authority, without some kind of moral...

The question "What is the basis of morality?" is obviously an extremely difficult one, and it can sometimes seem as if there are as many answers to that question as there are philosophers who have thought about it. Or maybe more. But I take it that the questioner's central worry is whether there is any real possibility that law might not "derive its power...from some kind of (religious?) moral basis". And that is quite a different matter. There are, I think, two important things to say about this. First, it's not at all clear that religion is capable of providing the kind of basis for morality that is sought. This is often regarded as one of the central points of Plato's great dialogue Euthyphro . There, Socrates poses the question, whether what is good is good because the Gods will it, or whether the Gods will what is good because it is good. And his point is that neither answer is very happy. If what is "good" is good only because the Gods will it, then even torturing babies for fun would be...
Abortion

Is it rational to both maintain that abortion is entirely morally permissible (on the grounds that a fetus is not a person, let's say) and to regret having had one?

And for yet another persepctive on this, it seems as if it is morally permissible not always to be a "good samaritan". But of course one might reasonably regret not having been a "good samaritan" on some particular occasion, i.e., regret not having gone out of one's way---beyond the call of moral duty---to do something for someone. It therefore seems perfectly reasonable, in general, to regret things one had, and knows one had, every moral permission to do. A cognate point is made explicitly in Judith Jarvis Thomson's classic paper, "A Defense of Abortion". To say that something is morally permissible is simply to say that it isn't morally prohibited: It's a fairly weak claim in some ways. In particular, it doesn't at all follow that the thing in question is, all things considered, the best thing to do, nor even that it is, all things considered, a particularly nice thing to do. So, if I remember correctly, Thomson says she is quite willing to concede, so far as her argument is concerned, that it...
Knowledge
Philosophers

I have been reading Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations (a difficult text indeed) and have a question about his theory of knowledge; specifically, Nozick concedes to the knowledge skeptic that we cannot know, say, if we are a brain in a vat on Alpha Centauri (our experience of the world would be identical, says the skeptic, to what it is now, so we cannot know); but he then also notes that it does not follow that I cannot know, say, that I am typing on my computer. If I understand correctly, Nozick holds that my belief that I am typing tracks the fact that I am typing; I would not have the belief that I am typing if I were not typing. This, however, seems problematic to me; it seems to beg the question, i.e. assume the “fact” that I am typing is indeed a fact. Isn’t this what we precisely do not know according to the skeptic? What if I see a perceptual distortion, for example, a pencil wobbling like rubber when I place it between my thumb and index finger and quickly move it back and forth? My...

This doesn't seem at all clear. First of all, the argument assumes that, to know whether we know, on Nozick's account, we would have to know whether a certain counterfactual is true. But this isn't obvious. Water is H2O, but it doesn't follow that, to know whether something is water, you have to know whether it is H2O. Similarly, even if knowledge is (say) Nozick-style tracking, it does not follow that, to know whether you know, you have to know whether you track Nozick-style. That might follow if Nozick's account is construed as providing some kind of conceptual analysis, but even then there are issues that tend to go under the heading "The Paradox of Analysis". Second, even if the foregoing is waived, I don't see why we can't know "whether the subjunctive condition Nozick deems necessary for knowledge is fulfilled". Surely we do have lots of knowledge about possibility, necessity, and counterfactuals. Of course, the epistemology of modal knowledge is a vexed issue, but so is the epistemology of...

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