The short answer I think is, yes, one could imagine situations where all the participants in a war had strong reasons for participating. A more insightful answer to your question, however, will depend on exactly how one understands the ethics of war and peace. For example, if it turns out that pacifism is correct (for more on this doctrine, see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pacifism ), then the answer to your question may be--depending on the exact version of pacifism that is true--"no" because it turns out to be impossible for any act of warfare to be justified. On the other hand, if just war theory is correct (for this, see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/#2 ), then one can imagine situations where multiple parties to a war were justified according to the rules of jus ad bellum. Since those rules are pretty strict, however, in practice I imagine that this rarely occurs, if it ever does. (It is possible, however, under this doctrine -- it is not the case that "every war is...

I'm not sure exactly what sort of help you need to be able to answer yourquestion and, because your query reads like a course assignment, I'm alsounsure what kind of help I ought to give to you. Assuming you are a philosophystudent completing a course assignment, here is some general advice that mightbe useful to you. My advice comes in the form of questions that I might ask oneof my own students who felt stuck. First, which of these ethical theories interests you the most? For example,which one seems the most deeply insightful to you, which one seems the mostintellectually provocative or challenging, which ones seems the most difficultto understand (but worth the effort of working hard to do so)? Second, for the ethical theory you have selected what is the key idea orprinciple or test that determines whether or not the act of downloading youdescribe should be viewed as an ethical act? You'll need to identify thisaccurately and precisely, ideally by working with two or three "crucialquotes" from a...

Your question raises interesting issues about philosophical methodology and also about some specific content areas. With respect to the methodology, yourquestion may falsely assume that using the tools of logic throughreasoning means paying no attention to your intellectual or moralintuitions and to your emotional responses to specific situations andproblems. I don't think that is the case, however, because thoseintuitions and those emotional responses can be included among thethings that you reason logically about. At least, I don't see anyreason to include them from the "deliberative mix" and I do note thatphilosophers frequently appeal to intuitions in rational argumentseven in some of the most abstruse corners of philosophy like thephilosophy of language. With respect to the primacy of logic, itstrikes me that to affirm logic as "primary" means, in part, thatstrongly-held gut feelings are amenable to rational discussion,assessment, and, potentially, overturning. If there truly is...

I'm not sure how to answer your main question: It seems to me that to say that a statement is offensive is to say that people tend to be offended by it, and so I don't have a clear sense of how a statement could be "inherently offensive" if by that you mean assessed with no reference to individuals' dispositions to judge it offensive. A related question may be whether, as an empirical matter of fact, there are some statements that exist some statements are held to be defensive by an overhwelming majority of a given population in many contexts. Probably so, but even then I imagine that are few or no statement that offend all individuals in all communicative contexts. For example (and hopefully not to offend readers by this usage of the word), many statements using the word 'cunt' are extremely offensive and yet there are some usages of that word that many find empowering -- I have in mind, in particular, the popular monologue about "reclaiming 'cunt'" that has been included for many years in Eve...

Your question raises a number of really interesting issues. One of these is how to distinguish ethical questions from non-ethicsones. Could it be the case that your question about toplessness doesnot raise any moral issues at all and so isn't the sort of questionthat can be answered by appeal to ethics? You are right, of course,that questions of nudity strike an emotionally-charged nerve in ourculture. But does this necessarily mean that these responses are bestunderstood or assessed as ethical responses? For example, people in ourculture feel strongly about table manners but these seem to beculturally relative and more a matter of etiquette than morality. Arepeoples' positions about toplessness akin to those non-moral questionsof etiquette? If so, maybe it is wrong to seek a specifically ethicalassessment of the norms and conventions you wish to understand. Another important ethical issue arises no matter how you address theissue I just described: The ethical significance of the norms...

Parents certainly bear many moral obligations to their children, including obligations related to how the parents interact with each other. That said, I don't think that monogamy is morally required of married parents or other parents who live together in a sexual relationship. To the extent that an extramarital sexual relationship could be carried out entirely separate from the family -- and from family responsibilities -- it might be simply irrelevant to parenting. Perhaps many individuals do not have the skills or are not in a situation where to make that separation possible, but some parents may have those skills or be in that situation. Likewise, I suspect there are parents in loving relationships, and who are effective parents, have chosen to reject monogamy and who have also learned how to construct a good family life for themselves and for their children. For more on this, the discussion by the self-described "kinky" communities. So, monogamy may be a useful practice for many...

I think it is also interesting to consider arguments suggesting that procreation should not be viewed as a fundamental human good that individuals should be able to enjoy when they choose to become parents and find themselves in a position to live up to the responsibilities of parenthood. Consider the thought that our uncreated potential descendants deserve our moral consideration. The act of being brought into existence surely is one of great ethical significance, and yet it is an ethically significant act that we "force" upon our children. Could this act of coercion itself be immoral? If so, procreation might be immoral. Or consider this ecological argument: Might the many potential generations of future humans have a moral claim on us not to despoil the earth to such an extent that their lives are severely compromised? Suppose, further, that there exists a maximum population size that beyond which it becomes ecologically and technologically impossible for humans to meet that...

I think the short answer is that Kant's transcendental idealism and empirical realism does not imply the each of us "structures reality" at the very moment we perceive objects and events in the world because one part of what it means to assert the empirical reality of the spatial and temporal world we experience and within is that all of us live together in a single world whose existence and structure is not dependent on acts of our minds. This is part of what Kant has in mind when he argues that his transcendental idealism should not be interpreted as empirical idealism – he accepts empirical realism and argues that transcendental idealism is needed to explain how it is possible for us to experience the empirically real world. To be sure, each of the Kantian claims and assertions that you discuss raises exegetical and philosophical puzzles and there are also interesting puzzles about how these various strands of Kant's thought fit together and about how Kant's thought on these topics changes over the...

Paul Feyerabend's Against Method is extremely lively andinteresting, those perhaps more challenging than the others onThomas's list. If you are interested in an historical perspective,these two books are readable, interesting, and relatively concise:G.E.R. Lloyd, Early Greek Science; Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science.

One answer to your question is that there may be multiple "orders of time" and, in particular, there may exist an order of time that is separate from the one we normally experience and within which events can occur. Thus, for example, in Western Europe around and in the centuries before 1500 certain religious rituals, ecstatic experiences, moments in liturgical calendars, may have been experienced as occurring in a special "sacred time" that constitutes a different temporal order from commonplace "secular time." In his A Secular Age (and a book I've mentioned before on this site),Charles Taylor argues that our ancestors in Western Europe possessed this bifurcated experience of two orders of time and he provides a rich account of why it is that almost everyone alive today in Western Europe and North America experiences secular time only.