This doctrine is sometimes known as ethical hedonism and itlies at the heart of some very grand traditions in ethics, inparticular, utilitarian ethics, first forcefully and extensivelyarticulated by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. Feeling good, orperhaps the net balance of pleasure over pain, was deemed to bevaluable in itself and furthermore the only thing that has value initself. That it is the only thing of value seems quite wrong at firstblush: lots of things that don't feel good, for instance education, aredeemed by many to be valuable. But utilitarians (for instance, JohnStuart Mill in his Utilitarianism ) argued that this wasillusory. Other things are deemed to be of value because they lead tohappiness, or because they've become so associated with happiness thatthey've come to viewed as part of happiness. Neither Bentham nor Millthought they could prove that happiness itself was of value -- that wassimply too basic a proposition to admit of proof. Mill argued that youcould only show...

No, I wouldn't. Humans are creatures with language and thought, and these features of our life permeate our loving. Dogs lack language and thought (in anything like the sense in which humans possess these), and so whatever it is that they are doing, it's not loving in the sense that we do this. Harder to answer is whether we love dogs in anything like the way in which we love another person.

If this site shows anything at all, it's that philosophical questions and problems are part of many people's lives. And if philosophy is useful in understanding and responding to those questions, then we have the answer to your question.

Usually, the question "Why should I care about X?" is asked against the backdrop of many cares that are taken for granted. Often we convince ourselves to care about something by showing that it's a means to getting or sustaining something we antecedently care about. I'd like to hold (but people disagree: see Question 127 ) that there are some things we care about immediately, without the need to have that care mediated by anything else we care about. But either way, if one gets into a state in which one cannot see why one ought to care about anything, life included, well then it's hard to see how to find the materials in that care-less world from which to fashion any kind of care. The theoretical expectation of this difficulty is borne out by examining case histories of the descent into what used to be called "melancholia". For instance, you might appreciate John Stuart Mill's Autobiography , in Chapter V of which he describes his nervous breakdown at the age of 20: he no longer attached...

It's worth distinguishing between what one is free to do and what value to one that freedom has. Perhaps you're right that in a world in whichthere was no political society (a State of Nature, as some politicalphilosophers call it) we would be free to do many more things than weare now (since no laws would exist that restrict our freedom). But the worth of those freedoms would be very small. Yes, we'd be free to travelwherever we wanted (without the need for passports, etc.), but mostlikely, absent the security that a political society provides, thelevel of industrial development would be so low that there would be nocars, no planes, no roads, etc. Even if there were roads, it would beso very dangerous to set out on them that I wouldn't dare risk it.Whereas now, my freedom to travel is worth something to me: I can drive(I have a car, I can buy fuel for it, there are roads!) confidently tothe airport (there are airports!) and take a plane (there's anaerospace industry!) to Reykjavik. The freedom to...

I agree with you that the state before you're born is like the state after you've died in that in neither will you exist. But I don't agree that these are states that we somehow experience. I note that you yourself place "experience" in scare quotes, indicating that perhaps it's not to be taken literally. And that's right: the period after you've died and before you're born is not a period in which you are around and having, how can we put it?, rather bland experiences. No. Before you're born and after you've died, there is no you to be the subject of any experience. Your birth brings that subject of possible experiences into being and your death terminates its being.

Just a quick comment on your remark about (2). If there are no necessary beings, then the set of necessary beings is empty. The empty set is a subset of every set. (Every element of the empty set is a member of any given set — since the empty set has no elements.) Hence, if there are no necessary beings, the set of necessary beings is indeed a subset of the set of impossible beings, just as it is a subset of any set. I'm not quite sure what an impossible being is, so I'm not quite sure what the set of impossible beings is. It sounds to me like it's another way of describing the empty set. But whatever the set of impossible beings is, we know that, if there are no necessary beings, then the set of necessary beings is a subset of it . I don't see any contradiction here.

No, our having eyes doesn't prove that at all. The theory of naturalselection provides an alternative explanation for how our visual systemdeveloped, an explanation that makes fewer assumptions than onethat appeals to a pre-existing "consciousness" (whose own existence andattributes don't require explaining?). For an entertaining expositionof this kind of explanation, you might read Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene .

I'm not sure those who hold that is is just to kill or execute people under certain circumstances believe this simply because "our peers say it is". That might explain why some people have formed this judgment, but it doesn't tell us why we ought to form the judgment, that is, tell us what's to be said in the judgment's defense. (See Question 367 for more on why this would be a problematic argument.) If you think it's wrong, it's worth trying to say why it's wrong. To begin with, you might try to get a sense of the contours of your moral judgments? For instance, do you think we're also "bereft of compassion" to deprive individuals of their freedom? For the remainder of their lives? For five years? Perhaps you'd be interested in Debating the Death Penalty , a collection of essays arguing both sides of the case.

I'm not sure I do quite get what you're after. Can't one think about moving one's fingers? Didn't you think about just that when you formulated your question? Is it that you believe that we don't have familiar concepts or words to describe the movements our fingers make, but we do to describe our breathing (e.g., exhaling , inhaling )? And absent such concepts/words, we can't form thoughts? But about the first: even if there is no single word in English for the movement my fingers make when I grasp my coffee mug, I can refer to that movement -- that's what I just did when I used the words "the movement my fingers make when I grasp my coffee mug". And if I can talk about that movement, then I can think about it too.