He will ruin his arm -- that's a major burden for a child who loves sports. The goal of saving his arm seems a lot more important than the other considerations you mention. But perhaps you don't actually have to make this choice. Instead of informing the league, you might just talk to the MRI technician (who already knows that you know, and is responsible for your knowing, the boy's condition). Urge the technician to tell the doctor that the boy is being pitched by his coach and that his parents apparently approve of this. (The technician can say that this information comes from someone else without saying that this someone else -- you -- knows about the severity of the boy's injury.) The doctor can then decide what to do -- e.g., telephone the boy and/or the parents or write them a stern letter, and, if all else fails, communicate her or his concerns to the league. The doctor best understands the boy's condition and can speak about it with the greatest authority.

When Mary is depressed, this rubs off on those who are close to her. It casts a shadow over their lives and deprives them of what Mary might otherwise add to their flourishing. Her depression also, and more substantially, blights her own life, makes it less rich, interesting, successful than it would otherwise be. Both points support the conclusion that it is ethically desirable that Mary get over her depression. For her own sake and for the sake of others, Mary ought to do what she can to get over her depression and others should support her effort. This conclusion goes against your hypothesis that Mary should spare her friends the effects of her depression. This on your very plausible assumption that isolating oneself from one's friends has adverse effects on one's depression. Mary needs friends in the state she's in. And, realizing this, her (true) friends wouldn't want her to withdraw. Putting this in terms of the Golden Rule, Mary might ask herself: If a good friend of mine were depressed...

"I don’t see why a person who would never, ever consider raping a woman might not still enjoy fantasizing about raping a woman." I agree that this is possible. But this does not really answer the question whether there would be anything wrong with such fantasizing and such enjoyment. Leaving aside chess (which offers enjoyment of a very different kind), I think that this would be wrong - even if it did not lead to any kind of violent behavior toward actual women . Why? First, it would be wrong because the rape fantasizer could not know in advance what we assume to be true, namely that his fantasies would not cause him to be violent. He cannot know that, drunk or sober, exuberant or depressed, he'll never act out his fantasies when a "safe" opportunity presents itself. (To this one might respond that actual violence may be as easily triggered by not fantasizing about it as by fantasizing about it. Refraining from violent fantasies is as likely as its opposite to cause violence. By...

How you live will have effects long after your death (see also question 1689). But if these effects carry no message of your character and personality, of your thoughts and emotions, loves and successes, they may not mitigate the feeling of looming utter insignificance. The dreadful feeling is that there will come a time after which you, along with everything in your life, will never again mean anything to anyone. Even the greatest authors face this feeling -- only the vainest don't. I see two ways to allay this feeling, both articulated in Derik Parfit's work. One is to dissociate what you care about from yourself. Say you care greatly about the environment or the preservation of animal species. If you really care for such a goal, and believe that people in the future will also work for it and will help achieve it tolerably well, then you can feel that -- even if your own contribution is entirely forgotten -- what you worked for is achieved. The other way of allaying the feeling of...

As you make finer and finer measurements in the way you suggest, the probability declines each time by a factor of 10. As you go on and on, it shrinks below any value no matter how small. But, no matter how long you go on, it will never be zero, it will always be more than zero. (This is analogous to how, when you count, you'd eventually surpass any number anyone cares to specify but never reach infinity.) OK, so far no paradox. But mathematics also recognizes numbers whose decimal extensions are infinitely long. And if you express each person's height as such a number, then your paradox does indeed arise. And I am not surprised, as there are other paradoxes involving infinite numbers as well, for instance, that there are as many even numbers as there are natural numbers, as demonstrable by a one-to-one mapping. Still, this is a nice addition (at least to my stock)! Let's see what others think.

Your examples are good ones. Still, I doubt that hatred always presupposes love in the way you suggest. Consider a girl born into slavery, separated from her mother at birth, and abused by her owner. She may come to hate this man, it would seem, even if she never loved -- never really had a chance to love -- anyone or anything. You may respond that she hates the man, and the abuse he inflicts upon her, only because she longs for, and loves, living unabused. As an empirical claim about human psychology, this is dubious. The little girl may not have enough of a conception of what life without abuse would be like to be said to love such a life. To get around such worries, in this and all other cases, someone might say that it is part of the meaning of hating that one loves some enemy or opposite of what one hates. In this way you can win your case by showing that every proposition of the form "A hates X" presupposes a proposition of the form "A loves Y (e.g., not-X)". But if we...

You are asking what we call a counterfactual question. Some such questions present little difficulty. For example, if your parents had never met, you would not be here asking hard questions. Your counterfactual question is much harder, because you are asking us to imagine something that is quite remote from the world we know. You are asking what human beings and human life would be like if we lacked the idea of counting. Given the kind of intelligence we have, it's a foregone conclusion that we would count, I think. So you are really not asking about human beings, but about some less-endowed or differently-endowed beings (perhaps some distant pre-human ancestors) who are otherwise similar to us. There isn't just one such species we might imagine (or discover). And the answer to your question could then be different for different non-counting but otherwise human-like species. I would doubt, though, that beings whose mental faculties do not lead them to count would do much else that we would call...

Like that between being strong and being a good football player. Having charisma is very helpful in teaching. It can get students to concentrate and to pay attention without really trying. But this can be worthless when the teacher is incompetent, unfocused, unclear, or fails in some other way to get the material across. In that case, students may still remember her or him years later, but they won't remember what was covered in the course. With charisma, it's easier to be a good teacher. But charisma alone does not ensure success.

Even if the question suggests rationalization and some self-deception, there is still the more philosophical question of why this affair is wrong (if it is wrong). Contrary to what you suggest, the fact that the wife does not know is probably sufficient to make the affair wrong. She stuck to this man throughout his serious illness and thereafter, because she believed and still believes that they have a certain relationship with each other which she values highly. She does not in fact have such a relationship -- her husband feels no attraction for her and is in love with you. If she knew that her life in fact lacks what she values highly, that her husband describes her to his lover as abusive, that he stays with her only because she looked after him when he was ill -- if she knew all this, then she would very seriously consider leaving her husband to try to build a new relationship of the kind she values. The deception deprives her of this opportunity and leads to her life failing miserably in a...

The sentence says that they -- the European Union and NATO, I think it was -- have different purposes and different ways of operating. What's the language of this sentence, you ask. Well, what's the color of the American flag? Red, white and blue, I would say. The sentence is a (somewhat pompous) composite of English, French and Latin.