In the context of human rights, there is often talk about so-called "group rights." One such group right is the right to protection against genocide - i.e., against mass murder. Why is a "group right" necessary in such cases? If one accepts the validity of human rights at all, then one almost certainly accepts that all individuals, including all members of a minority group, have the right to life. Why provide an additional group right against genocide? Anyone committing genocide is necessarily and directly infringing upon the right to life. What is gained by formulating extra group rights, besides an additional offence to add to the records of human rights offenders? Other "group rights" are also, or could easily be, covered by individual rights (right to speak the language of one's choice, right to teach one's children the language and culture of one's choice, etc.). Groups, unlike the individuals that make up the group, cannot be said to suffer at all unless their constituent individuals suffer,...

I can see at least two responses to your challenge. International interventions and sanctions are confined to the most serious violations of human rights. And the seriousness of crimes is not merely a matter of the harm done to the victims, but also a matter of the motivations of the perpetrators. Just as we regard premeditation as an aggravating condition, we so regard also aggression directed against people on account of their skin color, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. Genocide -- defined as the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group -- is then arguably more serious than random violence of comparable magnitude. And the special expression is then useful to indicate the heightened responsibility of people, within the affected society and abroad, to preempt genocide and to stop it with all deliberate speed if it nonetheless occurs. Or so one might argue. The other response can be introduced through your...

Why do we seem to consider the life of a child more valuable than that of an adult in many situations? When we consider the actual qualities of a child versus that of an adult, we should find that the adult usually wins on any measure of intelligence, capability, moral faculties, and so forth. Is there any ethical reason why we should value the life of a child more than that of an adult? (And just to be extra clear, I can think of a very compelling evolutionary reason why we would value a life of child more, but I'm not looking for an answer from biology or psychology.)

Isn't the reason just this? When an adult dies prematurely -- say at age 40 -- then she is losing many years of valuable life. When a child dies, then she is losing those same valuable years above 40 and in addition all the good life years up to 40. So the basic thought here is simply that the earlier someone dies, the greater the loss. While the common view seems to me to be based on this thought, it is not unassailable. You might say that the loss of years above 40 isn't a serious loss for someone dying as a small child, who has no conception of what such years would be like and moreover is very different from the mature adult she would have become 40 years hence. Thinking this through further, you might reach the view that the worst age at which a human being could die is in her or his mid-20s. At that age, one has a conception of the life one wants to lead and also typically is a productive member of one's family and society. Such a death is a great loss to the person and to many others...

What is the accepted date for the setting of Plato's Phaedrus and when was it written?

This took a bit of homework and consulting to find out. Many scholars seem to think that there may not be a determinate date for the setting of the Phaedrus as Plato was not committed to historical accuracy and ready to create a composite from different times to suit his dialectical purposes. This view is exemplified by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff who, on page xiii of the introduction to their edition of the Phaedrus (Hackett 1995), assert that the people mentioned in the dialogue as present in Athens were never there at the same time: Lysias did not arrive in Athens until 412 BCE, Phaedrus was in long-term exile 415-403 BCE, and the dialogue strongly suggests that Sophocles and Euripides (who both died in 406 BCE) are still alive at the time it takes place. The most authoritative work on the dramatic dates of Plato's dialogues is Debra Nails: The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and OtherSocratics (Hackett 2002). She disagrees with Nehamas/Woodruff and settles on 418...

If someone died at age 95, we wouldn't think him unfortunate--it isn't a bad thing, for him, not to have lived much longer. However, if someone died at age 15, we would thing him unfortunate. Why? I suspect that our intuition here has to do with the fact that 95 is well above the average life expectancy for humans, while 15 is well below average. But why should that matter here?

I suspect that your suspicion is partially correct: there is the intuition that someone who is doing worse than average and worse than most is unfortunate. But two other factors come in as well. There is the fact that only a very small percentage of those who reach age 15 fail to reach 16 -- whereas a rather substantial percentage of those who reach age 95 fail to reach age 96. And people perceive it as more unfortunate to be among a very small fraction who suffer harm than to be one in a larger fraction. (If you're among 20 people worldwide to catch some infectious disease, you'll feel very unfortunate, much more so than if you got a cold along with 3 billion other people.) And there is the further fact that life beyond the 95th birthday tends not to be all that good -- the person who dies at 15 is losing many probably very good years of life whereas the person who dies at 95 is losing just a few bad ones. (If you lose $5000 you'll probably feel a lot more unfortunate than if you lose just $1....

Are there any academic papers that you would recommend to a student of philosophy, regardless of subject area being studied, as valuable foundational reading?

Yes, there are seminal works of philosophy that are of historical and systematic interest for the understanding they convey of what philosophy is. Here I would mention at least a dozen historical works before any more recent academic papers - works by the usual suspects: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill, Frege, and Wittgenstein. With regard to academic papers - by which I take you to mean shorter works published in the last 60 years or so - there is no settled canon. Still, it is pretty clear who have been the leading philosophers of this period; and pretty clear also, in most cases, what their most important essays were. It would be difficult to understand the current state of Anglophone philosophy without having read at least a good smattering of the following: W.V.O. Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and "Epistemology Naturalized", Donald Davidson's "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme", Philippa Foot's "The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine...

In response to a recent question about philosophy (http://www.askphilosophers.org/question/3529/), Oliver Leaman made the claim that, "there are no facts in philosophy." Briefly reviewing the definition of "fact" I see "something that actually exists; reality; truth." Can it really be that there is no truth in philosophy? It seems like the respondent has made an assumption that it very broad, fundamental, and contestable.

I think you are over-reading Oliver Leaman's point. He was contrasting philosophers to historians, pointing out that the latter can rely on a wealth of facts while the former cannot. So I believe he was referring to empirical facts ascertainable by observation, such as facts about bullets and bodies found underground beneath a Civil War battlefield. Such empirical facts constrain disagreement among historians (preventing historians from arguing that the battle was fought with swords and spears, for example). No such empirical facts constrain disagreements among philosophers - or so Leaman may plausibly be taken to have opined. This claim is less sweeping and fully compatible with your suggestions that there are truths in philosophy. This suggestion seems right to me. Some philosophical arguments are sound, others unsound. Some philosophical positions are coherent, others incoherent. Some philosophical objections are decisive, others fail. It would be quite natural to say that such truths express...

My question pertains to two common attributes given to God. Omniscience and omnipotence. If we use a definition of omniscience that includes knowledge of all future events (as most believers would today due to things like prophecy and revelation) then it follows that God knows all of his future actions with absolute certainty. If this is the case, then God's omniscience is compromised. For example, let's say God knows he is going to create a global flood "x" years in the future. If omniscience is perfect he MUST do that action and is powerless to do otherwise, lest he compromise his knowledge. If he does exercise his power and not flood the earth then he was previously wrong and his omniscience is compromised. Therefor no single entity can be all knowing and all powerful. Is this a good argument? I have never heard it used or refuted in a public debate/piece of literature.

It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it's quite compelling. Your argument assumes that God is in time in much the same way we take ourselves to be in time: experiencing only the present and acting only in the present. But, being omniscient, God would really be experiencing all times at once; and being omnipotent, he would be shaping the entire universe at once, from (temporal) beginning to (temporal) end or throughout an unbounded, infinite duration. An omniscient and omnipotent God engages in only one grand act of creation which is fully transparent to Him. Or so it might be said in response to your argument. Still, I believe your conclusion can be supported in another way. With regard to omniscience we might ask whether God can really know why He exists. We find this question raised, for example, in a little-known passage in Immanuel Kant's masterwork The Critique of Pure Reason : "We cannot put aside, andyet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which werepresent to ourselves...

Is there a difference between a number as an abstract object and as a metric unit used to measure things?

Yes, in my view. Suppose there were no difference between the number 3 as an abstract object and the number 3 as used to express a certain length or volume. This would mean that there is no difference between 3 meters and 3, and no difference between 3 and 3 liters. Would it then not follow (by transitivity of no difference ) that there is no difference between 3 meters and 3 liters?

This is the first sentence of Stanford Encyclopedia's article on rights: "Rights are entitlements (not) to perform certain actions, or (not) to be in certain states...." I checked my English dictionary, and it defines "right", in the relevant sense, as "entitlement", and "entitlement" as "right". In my own language (not English), there aren't even two different words for "right" and "entitlement", they must both be translated to the same word. I think we can conclude that "right" and "entitlement" are synonymous, as much as any two words can be. So do you think that there is any useful reading of that article's first three words? Thank you!

I agree that the word "entitlement" isn't helpful as an explication of "right" -- though the sentence still has some use by specifying the possible objects of rights (i.e. those things that a right might be a right to). As an editor of the SEP (though not of this particular entry) and as a friend of the author, I'll relay your concern and see whether we can get this changed.

The author of the "Rights" article has now sent me a long response. If you want to see it and/or want me to put you two in touch, please send your e-address to thomas.pogge@yale.edu

Couldn't we take the "ontological proof" of God's existence to prove that there are many God-like creatures? For instance, imagine a creature that has all thinkable perfections except for the fact that it has dirty fingernails. If existence is a perfection, then this creature must have this perfection, since one can both exist and have dirty fingernails. And so, if the ontological proof proves that God exists, then it proves that dirty fingernails-God exists too. Doesn't it?

I read the question differently from Oliver. The questioner agrees that dirty fingernails are an imperfection, in fact, this is part of the point. We are to imagine a being that is all-perfect except for those dirty fingernails. Now if existence is a perfection, as the ontological argument assumes, then this imagined being has it. So it exists. (And never mind whether it's Divine or Divine-like, that's irrelevant to the point.) And likewise for all the other imaginable beings that are all-perfect except for one imperfection (other than non-existence) -- each of them also exists. And so do all the other imaginable beings that are all-perfect except for two imperfections (other than non-existence). And so on. So I think this is a nice reductio ad absurdum of the ontological argument for God's existence. If the ontological argument proves the existence of God, it also proves the existence of a vast number of other beings whose existence those interested in proving God's existence would have wanted to deny.

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