Here are a few things you might want to look at. In 1997, the InterAction Council drafted a UniversalDeclaration of Human Responsibilities, see www.interactioncouncil.org/ In 2002 the Fundacion Valencia Tercer Milenio published a Declaration of Responsibilities and Human Duties, available at http://globalization.icaap.org/content/v2.2/declare.html Somewhat more detailed and useful are some of the General Comments produced under the auspices of the United Nations (see http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/gencomm/econ.htm). As one example, see General Comment 14 on the human right to the highest attainable standard of health. Onora O'Neill has long written about the need to achieve greater clarity on who is required by human rights to do what for whom. See her books Towards Justice and Virtue and Bounds of Justice . And, if it's permissible, I'd also mention my own book World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms.

You are asking whether it is true that T=K (knowledge and truth are the same). From your asking this, I conclude that you don't know whether T=K. If truth and knowledge were the same, then lack of knowledge would be lack of truth. So, assuming T=K is true, we derive the conclusion that T=K is false. Better then to suppose that knowledge and truth are not the same. And of course they aren't. Something may be true and yet not be known by many or not be known by anyone at all. For example, take the following two sentences: "with optimal play, white can always win in chess" and "it is not the case that, with optimal play, white can always win in chess". One of these sentences is certainly true; but no one yet knows which one it is. (Or, if anyone does now, they haven't told me, so I don't know which is true.)

I don't think there's a named fallacy here, but I do think the principle proposed by Person 2 is unsound. If this principle were sound, then it would be impermissible to remain childless even in a world as overpopulated as ours. The principle can be revised to be more plausible. When many people in some group are making a morally motivated effort to achieve a certain good that would not exist (or to avert a certain harm that would not be averted) without their effort, then one has moral reason to do one's fair share if one is a member of this group. This sort of principle against free-riding on the moral efforts of others can explain why one should generally vote and do so conscientiously -- at least unless one has conclusive reason to judge that enough others are already acting and that one's own effort will therefore add nothing to the outcome. But there is also a more direct explanation of why one ought to vote. As philosopher Derek Parfit has argued, the extremely low probability of one...

Why should there be any incompatibility between dignity being both a goal and a justification? On the face of it, there seems to be harmony: if A is a worthwhile goal and B serves this goal, then B can be justified by appeal to A. Example: the goal of having a good job is served by having a good education and so obtaining a good education is justified by the contribution this education makes to winning a good job. Similarly in your case: the goal of protecting the dignity of human beings is served by instituting human rights and so instituting human rights can be justified by its contribution to protecting human dignity.

What does potential count for? I don't think there is a general answer here. One important variable concerns the relation between the potential time-slice person who never came to be and the entity whose development into that time-slice person was disturbed. When these two are closely related, then potential may count for a lot. When you prevent a very talented and highly trained athlete from traveling to the Olympics, then you deprive this person of her chance of a medal; and this seems quite serious because here the person prevented and the person who would have competed are very closely related (the same mature person a few days apart). But suppose the opportunity to compete in the Olympics was closed off much earlier by the parents who sent the first-grader to the chess club rather than to the gymnastics club, so that she becomes as chess lover rather than a gymnastics lover. While the world may have lost a great gymnast, this is not a substantial loss for her (because gymnastics never came to mean...

If you are talking about basic colors, then you are right: there are only finitely many of them, and to get beyond them one would then have to bring in "colors" beyond the visible spectrum, and this is indeed weird in the absence of beings that can actually perceive those "colors". But here's an argument on the other side. Suppose we are willing to count as colors all the different shades on the visible spectrum -- between 360 and 750 nanometers, let's say. Suppose these are densely packed so that between any two wave lengths there's always another one. Then we'd have infinitely many different colors all of which we can actually perceive. (There's a serious questions about whether this account is consistent with the latest physics, but set this aside for a moment.) Now you might object that two colors can be different only if (a) we are able to perceive both and (b) we are able to discern the difference between them . Our abilities of discernment are surely limited, and so there are not...

Your argument is fine so far as it goes, and it would be perfectly consistent for you to endorse moral relativism and also to protect the victims of what you consider to be wrongdoing -- for example, by locking up the perpetrators. But it would be difficult to justify such imprisonment as punishment. It is generally thought to be legitimate to punish people only when they are guilty in the minimal sense that they could or should have known that what they were doing was wrong. This is why we generally don't punish animals, children, the mentally handicapped and the temporarily insane. (To be sure, we find other ways to render them harmless in the future, but we don't think they deserve to be harmed for what they did.) Now if moral relativism were true, then there could be many views about right and wrong that are no worse supported than our own views; and then it cannot be said of the persons who acted wrongly by our lights that they should have known that what they were doing was wrong. These persons...

You might draw two distinctions here: between a situation and some way of responding to, or acting in, this situation; and between some situation or conduct requiring moral reflection and some situation or conduct being morally problematic. Pretty much any social situation requires some moral reflection: there are almost always conduct options that are wrong in that situation. For example, you might ask someone on a date in a insulting way, suggesting that you'll pay the meal only if you can have your way afterward; or you might decline a date in a humiliating way, saying that you would not want to be seen dead with so ugly a person. Such responses are morally wrong, and you need to be aware of this and avoid them. You also need to be aware that you should not ask just anyone on a date, not your student and not your friend's partner, for instance, and that you should not accept a date with such people even when they ask you out. So while many cases of offering and accepting/declining invitations on a...

I think your question is too broad. There is no general answer here, because much depends on what explanation is being offered for the behavior. An explanation of an action may justify it, may excuse it, may be a reason to forgive it, or may be none of the above. To justify an action is usually understood as claiming that the action was justified and therefore was not morally reprehensible after all. Using your example, perhaps Bob and his wife had agreed on a divorce and, while waiting for the divorce to become final, also agreed that it would be alright for them to date others. In this sort of situation, one could plausibly maintain that Bob does nothing wrong when he has an affair that he does not disclose to his wife. Or, to use another of your examples, perhaps the person Bob killed was in the midst of an attack upon an innocent person which Bob could stop only by shooting the attacker. The "none of the above" case at the other end of the spectrum is illustrated by explanations that confirm...

According to Kant, causality is among the organizing concepts through which our mind unifies its experience. Like space and time, causality as well is then not objective (i.e. wholly independent of our mind), but still "empirically" objective in the sense that we cannot help but structure and anticipate the world of our experience as causally ordered. This sort of account explains your "firm belief" that an uncaused cause defies commonsense. But it also cautions us against claiming any knowledge of what the world might really be like, apart from how our mental faculties are organizing it for us. The very strength of our conviction that nothing like an uncaused Big Bang could possibly have happened -- the strong feeling that we know this "a priori" -- would suggest to Kant that this belief discloses something about ourselves (about our way of organizing and unifying experience) rather about the world we inhabit. And so physicists could actually appeal to Kant in rejecting your belief as a...