It's a nice question. But let me ask another. Are you saying that it would have been better if God had not created creatures like us -- less than perfect beings? Suppose you think, as many theologians do, that there can be at most one perfect being. Then if God is going to create anything at all, s/he will have to create creatures that are less than perfect. And suppose you also think, as many theologians also do, that all things considered, it's a good thing for there to be creatures who can make free decisions, engage in moral effort, and love God and one another. That might be reason enough for a perfect being to create us. It may be that a truly perfect being wouldn't leave Reality populated by Itself alone. Whether the facts of the world really are compatible with the existence of a perfect being, of course, is a vexed and much-discussed question. Many people have argued that there's just too much evil for perfect-being theology to be plausible. But it's not immediately clear that only a...

A couple of thoughts. The first is that even though arithmetic may have been inspired by things that we do when we arrange objects like apples and baskets, arithmetic isn't "about" those concrete operations. On the contrary: suppose we "add" one rabbit to another and get 10 rabbits. Then we simply don't count what we did with the rabbits (or what the rabbits did) as the arithmetic addition operation. Likewise, if I "add" one drop of water to another, I'll get one drop. But that doesn't give us an exception to "1+1=2". Rather, we say that the sort of "adding" we do when we plop one drop on top of another isn't arithmetic adding. We could give some more or less arbitrary "operational definition" of some kind of real-world "dividing" of four apples into zero baskets, but it wouldn't tell us anything about arithmetic. There's another point. If dividing 4 by zero is going to make any sense, then the result can't be a real number (i.e., member of the set of reals). Why not? Because no matter how big a...

It's a really big question, and I'm not going to pretend to offer an adequate answer. It's hard to argue with the idea that it would be a good thing if everyone had decent health care. That said, not everyone thinks that it's legitimate for the State to try to bring it about. (I don't share this view, but that's an aside, not an argument.) But suppose, for argument's sake, that we agree: it's fitting for the State to step in and help ensure that everyone is covered. We can still ask what the most effective way to get close to that goal actually is, and here we run into questions of fact. Perhaps some variation on, say, the Canadian system is the best way to go. Perhaps some largely market-based scheme, with subsidies and/or credits for the less well-off will produce the best result. Or perhaps some innovative market/State solution is what's called for. These are questions that philosophical thinking can't settle by itself. Insofar as they're part of the "arguments for and against," they'll call for...

Others who spend more time thinking about such issues may well have more to say, but your question struck a chord with me because even though I'm not a Zimbabwean, I find the situation in Zimbabwe particularly distressing. The reason is partly personal: there are people I care about who have family and friends in Zimbabwe. And that fact lets us make a link with questions of patriotism and nationalism. We have obligations to people we don't know. At the very least, we are obliged not to do certain things that would harm them. And we may very well have more positive obligations to provide aid, for example, or defense. My point isn't to try to sort all that out. But virtually all of us take ourselves to have special obligations toward people with whom we have special relationships. Other things equal, I take my obligations to my friends, my family and my colleagues to be stronger and more extensive than my obligations to strangers. Indeed, these sorts of relationships are an imporant part of what makes...

I think we can leave aside all the heavy-weather issues about abortion, fetal rights and so on and go for a more general point. It's hard to see why we'd have to have a sharp answer to the question of when something acquires rights or becomes a person, or becomes depressed or becomes fluent in a language or for that matter becomes a tree, or becomes bald... for it to be okay to say: "It's not there yet." In fact, there may not even be a sharp answer to the question "What is the critical stage?" Of course, if someone had a reasonable argument for saying that an embryo is a person from day one, we'd still need to evaluate what they had to say. But they would have to do better than point out that we don't have any way to draw a bright line between person-to-be and full-fledged person.

Let's call the being that results from all this replacement Sarah2 . We can ask a pair of questions that seem different. One is whether Sarah2's conscious states will be like Sarah's. I agree with Mark that the answer to that question is yes; at least, it's hard to see why it would be no. But we can ask another question that seems to a different one: is Sarah2 the same person as Sarah? That's a lot more controversial. A comparison, based on an example by Peter van Inwagen: Suppose little Johnny builds a house from a small number of blocks and leaves it in the middle of the floor. And suppose that I come in and clumsily kick the house over. If I re-arrange the blocks in exactly the same way, then the house I assemble will be indistinguishable from the one Johnny built, but it's not so clear that it's literally the same house. And if I actually replace the blocks with new ones that are just like the old ones, then it's even less clear. So if we cryo-freeze Sarah, interrupting her normal...

I'd like to take this question in a slightly different direction. I accept the point made by Prof. George: we don't need to think of the phrase "absolutely nothing" as referring to something; the logic of "There's milk in the fridge" isn't the same as the logic of "There's absolutely nothing in the fridge." But I'd like to pick up on a point in my colleague Prof. Levinson's reply: that if there being absolutely nothing is a possible state of affairs, then reality contains that possibility. Start by mulling over the idea that there being absolutely nothing is a possible state of affairs. A person might wonder: is a state of affairs something? Are there such things as states of affairs? How about possible states of affairs? If so, then so long as there is at least one possible states of affairs, there's not absolutely nothing. Now suppose -- as at least some philosophers seem to -- that for it to be possible that X, there must be a possible state of affairs in which X is true. This brings us to a...

Let's start with an analogy and see how far it gets us. Suppose I consider a proposition about some distant place. Suppose I consider the proposition that the population of Woodstock, New Brunswick (my home town in Canada) is over 6,000. [To keep things simple, assume that I mean the population today, August 5 2007.] I'm contemplating this "here" in Washington DC. But it's a proposition about some other place -- "there," not "here." And now consider the question: "Does this proposition about Woodstock have to be true or false here in Washington?" The question seems a little odd. What the proposition asserts refers to a particular place, but the idea that the truth of the proposition is, as it were, tied to the place where it's being contemplated seems off. We might put it this way: the proposition picked out by my use of the sentence "Woodstock has a population over 6,000" is true if the population of Woodstock really is over 6,000 and false otherwise. Asking if the proposition is true ...

It may be that there are two questions hidden here. You're right: if we can compare things in terms of length or duration or utility, then we'll sometimes be able to say that they're the same on this scale -- that if we subtract one value from the other, we get zero. But there's another question: is there such a thing as a thing's having zero length, taking zero time or possessing zero utility? Length and duration are not quite the same sorts of scales as utility. Length and duration are ratio scales. It makes sense to say that this stick of wood is twice as long as that one. Turns out that this goes with the fact that there is such a thing as having no length or lasting for no time. In these cases, we have a natural zero. However, it may not make sense to say that one thing has twice as much utility as another. Utility scales are interval scales. All that matters are the ratios of the differences. Let's make this a bit more concrete. I might rate the utility of a cup of coffee at 1,...

I would add this, however. While it certainly can be rational to commit suicide, people who are considering suicide aren't always in a good position to think about it rationally. That's for the obvious reason that many (perhaps most) people who are seriously thinking about killing themselves are depressed, and part of what depression does is make it hard to think clearly. A depressed person might believe that there's no hope, and that the pain will never end, but that's often not true. So yes: suicide can be rational. But if you know someone who's thinking about it, helping them get help may serve what they would understand as their own rational ends if only they were in a better position to see them.