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Mathematics

Are there formal ways (outside of mathematics) in which axioms are chosen? Can you give guidelines in constructing axioms? Must axioms base themselves in sensory awareness?

Axioms are the foundation of a theory, that from which all its claims are derived. What then grounds or justifies the axioms themselves? In practice, axioms are justified in large part by their implications. This may sound circular, but isn't on reflection. As we start theorizing in some particular domain of inquiry, we already have firm ideas about some truths and falsities, and we want to formulate our axioms so that they confirm these antecedent commitments. This approach is captured by the term axiomatization . We are to axiomatize our antecedent commitments, that is, we are to formulate a small set of axioms from which we can elegantly derive the much larger and messier set of propositions we hold true antecedently (including negations of propositions we hold false antecedently). Of course, such an axiomatization is successful only if the set of chosen axioms does not permit derivation of a contradiction. Somewhat paradoxically, axioms are then justified not by appeal to something...
Justice

Should a society provide support from general funding (e.g., income tax) to individuals whose actions lead directly (and possibly predictably) to their distress; e.g., medical care for heavy smokers who suffer smoking related illness, air-sea rescue for recreational ocean-going sailors, financial support to people who are not willing to fully support themselves. Some of these examples are complex and contentious; but, what is fair and how can we administer a fair system?

Where survival, basic health, or dignity are at stake, personsshould be entitled to society's support. In first approximation, a fairsystem of such support might be one that is funded out of revenuesraised from those who might call on it. For example, tobacco users areentitled to any additional essential medical care they may need as aresult of their habit, and the cost of such additional care is fundedout of tobacco taxes. Some may object to this system that itunduly restricts their liberty. They prefer not to fund the support andnot to receive it should they need it. These objectors fall into twogroups: Some want the support but pay for it as needed. The others want to forgo the support altogether. Insome cases it would make sense, ideally, to exempt people in the firstgroup. Thus consider some of your recreational ocean-going sailors, for example , who do not want to contribute to marine rescues of people theyconsider irresponsible amateurs. Each of them gives society somefinancial...
Justice

Throughout history, it seems people have refuted the principle of "rights acquired by birth", often because it is contradictory to democracy. Concerning illegal people (people without papers), I feel there are strong similarities, as basically they are criminalised for staying in otherwise public area's, while people who were born there gain that right automatically. Why is it, that it seems completely acceptable to criminalise people just for "being" somewhere, while this seems ridiculous from an ethical point of view? Why isn't "Kein Mensch ist illegal" a basic human rights principle?

The practice "seems completely acceptable" to us , citizens of the wealthy countries -- presumably because we are used to it and seem to benefit from it. I doubt that it seems completely acceptable to the majority of the world's poor. Is the practice acceptable? Our practice of private property is often defended on the ground that it greatly increases human wealth -- so that human beings on average, or perhaps the poorest 20% on average, are better off than would otherwise (under any alternative practice or none at all) be the case. In a similar way, one could defend national jurisdictions with rights to exclude foreigners. Here, however, the argument is very unlikely to succeed. Many economists have argued that national mobility restrictions greatly dampen productivity worldwide. And such restrictions also make it very much harder for the poorest and most vulnerable human beings to protect themselves and their families. I agree they have a human right to move or to enjoy some compensating...
Ethics
Law

I recently read an article where a lawyer referred to something called "Role Morality" in defending his behaviour (which was not especially moral). What is "Role Morality" and what school or body of philosophy does it belong to? How is it supposed to work? It seemed somewhat bogus when presented as an excuse for behaviour that would otherwise be called immoral. Maybe there's a different moral system for lawyers? Thanks.

We sometimes play certain social roles in which it is morally appropriate to disregard certain otherwise weighty considerations and to give great weight to others than one could otherwise disregard. Examples. A trustee should try to find the best possible investments for her ward without regard to how such investments of his funds would affect the value of her own portfolio. A judge or juror should set asides her likes and dislikes of certain kinds of people. A legislator should disregard the impact pending legislation would have on her son's business. The common idea here is that important social purposes are best promoted if the occupants of certain roles understand them in these ways. The lawyer's role is somewhat unusual because it is fitted into an adversarial system. The idea behind such a system is that the socially best outcomes are achieved when some of the protagonists do not aim for them but for something quite different. To get the most exciting soccer match, we need players...
Knowledge

I don’t know if I’m right about this, but I often have the impression that philosophers have traditionally regarded the means of knowledge as some kind of obstacle to getting at ‘reality in itself’, as if the aim of scientific inquiry should be to somehow strip away the interferences of our own minds, bodies, perceptual capacities, language, etc., in order to unveil the world ‘in itself’, free of all ‘anthropomorphic colouring’. Whenever in my life I have occasionally found time to give myself over to speculative musings (and I’m not sure if it’s been too often, or not nearly enough!), I have often been tempted by a different idea, only then to drop it again as scientifically suspect, if not straightforwardly mythical or mystical. However, I’ve often wanted to put it to a professional philosopher to see what he or she would make of it. I’m sure it’s not at all original, and perhaps you can tell me which historical philosophers have held a similar view, but I’m mainly interested in whether or not anyone...

Immanuel Kant comes pretty close to articulating the points you make here. In one of his last writings, Kant tells the story of a man who stands in front of the mirror with his eyes closed (or almost closed). Asked what he is doing there, the man responds that he wants to see what he looks like when he is asleep. The story is funny because the man is attempting the impossible: When his eyes are really shut (as in sleep), then he will see nothing and, in particular, will not see what he looks like. And when his eyes are just a little bit open, then he will see himself alright, but with his eyes slightly open (not as in sleep) . The morale of this funny story is that the desire to know what the world is like apart from our faculties of knowledge is incoherent: We want to know, hence engage our faculties of knowledge, and yet know without these faculties of knowledge and presumably even without any faculties of knowledge at all. The story is meant to reconcile us to the fact...
Space

A friend and I were discussing our philosophy class a while ago, and somehow we got onto the subject of the properties of things and the definition of a place. We began to argue about whether you can be in an object or in a place. I said that you can only be in an object and to be in a place is impossible. But you can be at a place. Example: you are in the building, but you are at the DMV. She said the opposite. That it is possible to be in a place. Who is correct?

The in/at variation is a convention of the English language and has no equivalent in many other languages. It seems to mark no significant underlying distinction, and your question is then one about proper English. Understood in this spirit, I would say that you are both right. With some places we use "at", with others "in". Consider two buildings, for example, my school and my house. One could say that I am in the first building or at school. And one could say that I am in the second building, or in my house, or in my home, or at home, or at my place. I assume a grammarian could give you a general rule about when we use "in" and when "at". But, as my example shows, this rule cannot draw on the type of location alone.
Identity

(ill)Logical question: One formulation of the law of Identity states that a thing is equal to itself (e.g., "A=A"). The "thing" must always be represented (with a letter, a word, a number, a picture, etc.) in order to be communicated. These representations will have physical, measurable properties, and no two of them -- for instance, two spoken or written "A"s -- will have exactly identical physical properties. If you attempt to circumvent this mirror image comparison with, for example, an "A" with an arrow doing a U-turn back upon itself, you still must make a mental comparison, and that comparison takes time, and as Heraclitus famously puts it, you can't step in exactly the same river twice (in other words, the first thought "A" is gone by the time you think of its twin). So, without sprawling this out further with more examples, why doesn't it make more sense to assume that "a thing is NOT equal to itself"? I am probably just talking around some hackneyed epistemological issue. Can anyone sort...

You need here the distinction between a thing and its name(s) or representation(s). When someone says or writes "Mozart = Mozart," the two sound tokens or ink tokens are indeed subtly different. And even if somehow they were not, they would still be different in that one spoken "Mozart" precedes the other in time and one written "Mozart" is to the Southwest of the other. But the law of identity is not supposed to be about these name tokens, but about what they refer to. That referent, the entity being named by each of these tokens, is exactly the same: the man Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. That it's the referents, rather than the names one has in mind here is more easily appreciated by considering an "equation" with different signs on each side. Thus consider: Wolfgang Amadeus = Mozart Someone asserting this equation is not making the grotesque error of equating the two sound or ink tokens. Rather, she's claiming that these tokens refer to the very same thing.
Ethics
Medicine

Do patients have an absolute moral right to the confidentiality of their medical records?

An absolute right is presumably one that cannot be outweighed, forfeited, and/or alienated. (Such a right can still be waived -- e.g., by allowing your doctor to show your medical records to someone you nominate.) Let's look at these three issues with regard to the assumed moral right to the confidentiality of one's medical records. It seems evident that this right can be outweighed. Suppose, for example, that a society faces a serious risk of a pandemic involving a life-threatening and highly virulent pathogen (ebola, avian flu). May such a society require doctors to notify the authorities of any positive diagnosis so as quickly to isolate the patient and prevent contagion? With potentially millions of lives at stake, any right to confidentiality must surely give way. Less confidently, I would also think that the right in question can be forfeited, at least in part. Here is a possible case. Suppose the right is not outweighed by the danger to a single person. So, even where AIDS is still a...
Abortion

I was born in the early sixties before Roe v. Wade. When my mother got pregnant, my parents were unmarried, but they got married and I was born 8 months later. On the whole, I've had a wonderful life and I'm so grateful that I had a chance to experience it. I can't help thinking that if my mother had had an abortion, she would have done a terrible thing to me. She would have cut my life short--so short, in fact, that I wouldn't have ever had a chance to experience anything at all! If murder is bad because it denies a good life to a person in the future, then isn't abortion even worse?

By the same reasoning, your mother would have done a terrible thing to you if she had abstained from sex on this occasions or if she had insisted that your father use birth control. Such conduct, too, would have denied a good life to a person in the future. I assume that you would not want to classify such conduct as worse than murder, but rather as perfectly permissible -- even though sometimes, when you use birth control, a person who otherwise would have come to exist will not. The problem with your analogy is this: In the case of murder, there is a person who is harmed, a person who is deprived of further years of life, prevented from realizing her plans, projects, and ambitions. In the case of abstention or birth control, by contrast, there is no person who is harmed, no person whose life is cut short, no person disabled from realizing her plans, projects, and ambitions. Murder harms an existing person, birth control merely prevents the coming into existence of a person. This explains...
Ethics

Is inflicting pain immoral in itself, or only insofar as it accompanies or incurs bodily or psychological harm?

Neither, I would think. Inflicting pain is not immoral in itself, because it is sometimes necessary for the patient's health and authorized by the patient for this reason. Dentists inflicting pain are typically not acting wrongly. Even when pain is not associated with simultaneous or subsequent bodily or psychological harm, it may nonetheless be wrong to inflict such pain. For example, some people suffer no physical or psychological damage from mild torture (weak electric shocks administered for brief periods, say). It is nonetheless wrong so to torture such people just for fun.

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