I wanted to make some remarks on the principle of charity that go in a different direction from Eddy's answer to the question. The principle of charity admits of different interpretations: it can be understood--as Eddy seems to understand it--as enjoining one to make as much sense as possible of the words of another, and to give those words the strongest possible interpretation; it can also be understood--as Davidson, for one, seems to understand it--as a principle of rational accommodation, according to which the words of another are understood so as to maximize agreement. One problem with both formulations of the principle of charity, which is especially manifest in the second formulation, is that adherence to the principle of charity may lead one to attribute a meaning to the words of another that yields propositions that fail to capture the propositions that one's interlocutor was trying to express. Adherence to the principle of charity when doing work in the history of philosophy, for example,...

If one means by 'emotional infidelity' feeling attracted to another person than the one to whom is committed, or to feeling enmity or having bad thoughts towards someone towards to whom one is committed in friendship, than the phenomenon seems very possible indeed. Consider the following case, which I think is not idiosyncratic: something bad happens to a friend, and instead of sympathizing with that person--at least in one's thoughts--one takes pleasure in that friend's misfortune. (In German, this is called ' Schadenfreude '.) In taking pleasure in the misfortune of a friend, one is being emotionally unfaithful to that friendship--which, I think, in principle requires in principle that one sympathize and commiserate with the misfortunes of one's friend. The deep question, however, is why, if cases such as these are indeed correctly characterized as cases of emotional infidelity, why such emotional infidelity is as common as I think it is: one explanation, deriving from Christianity, is that human...

Although it does indeed seem to be the case that agents seem knowingly to do evil--one thinks of Milton's Satan, who says, "evil be now my good"--and that Socratic intellectualism, most clearly expressed, if I remember correctly, in the Protagoras --cannot be correct. But it seems to me that Socratic intellectualism--as it is sometimes called--presupposes a very strong conception of knowledge, one which most agents, including, probably, Milton's Satan, fail to achieve. The basic idea seems to me to be that if one had full or complete knowledge, then one couldn't do evil willingly. (In part because one would thereby know that in doing evil, one was failing to act in accordance with some virtue or another. So Socratic intellectualism seems to be closely connected to the Socratic view that all virtues are connected--the 'unity of the virtues'--and that all virtues are identical to knowledge. Given those assumptions, the Socratic view seems to be plausible; independent of the views attributed to...

Given that ex hypothesi , the life of luxury in question "relies on exploitation and unjust inequalities," it seems straightforwardly to be wrong to live such a life. For surely it is morally wrong to profit from inequalities that one recognizes to be unjust. If one were to modify the question, so that what was at issue was a life that relied on inequalities and exploitation, then the question would become more complicated: one would need to determine the nature of the inequalities in question, whether one's lifestyle itself contributed to perpetuating them, whether one could, by changing one's lifestyle, change them, and also to clarify the nature of the exploitation in question, to determine, for example, whether the 'exploitation' is, for example, a matter of differences, say, in the wages paid to and the working conditions of factory workers in China as opposed to those of factory workers in the United States. If one were to take up such issues then one would, I think, be engaging issues at the...

This is a dicey question, especially in light of the fraught family situation. All would be clearer if the original schedule to pay had been notarized and had, therefore been effectively made into a contract, in which case this would be a relatively straightforward case of contract law--but such is not the case. In light of the fact that the agreement to repay the money was a promise to repay--a promise which was broken--in failing to repay the money, your son did do something to undermine his relation to you. I can, therefore, understand the considerable symbolic significance of your request that your son sign a new commitment to repay the money that you loaned him, for in so doing, you seem to think--and I am inclined to agree--that your son will thereby signal his renewed commitment to repay the money to you, thereby at least implicitly recognizing that he had reneged on his initial commitment and harmed your relationship, which can be as it were set to rights and somewhat restored by his...

You're absolutely right that aesthetic terms are sometimes used to characterize action. Whether, however, there is an internal or conceptual or fundamental connection between judging an action in such aesthetic terms and judging it morally is a difficult question. In the early modern period, writers on ethics often divided between seeing morality in aesthetic terms and seeing it strictly in terms of moral relations. (David Gill has written on this issue in Philosophy Compass , starting from the historical question and then moving on to the more general question of whether morality is more like math or beauty--in other words, whether moral judgments are supposed to reflect eternal, immutable standards, or rather whether they are supposed to reflect one's 'taste'.) It's not clear to me, however, that there need be an opposition between characterizing an action as right or wrong and characterizing it as cruel or repulsive, for aesthetic judgments, like moral judgments, rest on reasons, and it is the...

It seems to me that in order for an agent to act rightly or wrongly, morally or immorally, s/he must be capable of having the concepts of right and wrong, moral and immoral: consequently, it seems to me that if certain animals were discovered to have the ability to have such concepts, then and only then could it be said that those animals were capable of right or wrong, moral or immoral actions. This is, it seems to me, an empirical question--albeit one that we may be unable to answer. But the mere behavior of animals does not, it seems to me, manifest the possession of such concepts.

The idea that there is a distinctively 'feminine' approach to ethics was articulated forcefully in the pioneering work of Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice : Gilligan argued that there are certain distinctive virtues and traits--such as care, empathy, forgiveness, etc.--that are coded 'feminine' that had gone underemphasized in more traditional, 'masculine', approaches to ethics and character development, which stressed the primacy of the development of an impartial, more 'rational' standpoint in ethics. The basic idea, that there are differences in the way that men and women make moral judgments, that reflect the way that they are socialized, makes good sense to me, and has been championed by a number of philosophers and developed in various ways, particularly by those interested in the 'ethics of care'. However, it seems to me to be incorrect to think that these differences are somehow 'fixed', or that men cannot come to look at the world from a more 'feminine' perspective (and vice versa ,...

This is a deep and important question, that goes to the heart of both our understanding of emotions and of responsibility. There seem to be conflicting intuitions about this question. On the one hand, it seems natural to think that an agent is only responsible for what she does, or for what is under her control, yet emotions--often also known as passions--seem to be events that happen to us, and therefore are not under our control, and so it would seem that we are not responsible for our emotions. On the other hand, we often do hold ourselves and other responsible for their emotions: one might worry about the fact that one is happy about a friend's failure, or that one laughs at a sexist joke, and we often expect others to feel certain ways. In this respect, emotions are very different from sensations, such as pain or hunger. Although one can cause oneself to feel pain--say, by deliberately striking one's hand with a hammer--normally, pain is a natural response to damage to one's body. ...

In Book 3, Part 1, Section 1 of A Treatise of Human Nature , Hume argues that "morals...cannot be deriv'd from reason; and that because reason alone...can never have any such influence. Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason." Hume himself went on to argue that moral judgments are akin to judgments of pleasure and pain, and, therefore, are akin to aesthetic judgments. The problem to which you point--how can moral judgments be verified--may rest on too narrow a conception of reason. (Surely the judgment that some work of art is beautiful is a cognitive judgment, not merely an expression of one's response to a work. Perhaps it is not the same sort of judgment as when one judges that 'Water is H2O', but maybe that only goes to show that there are different kinds of 'objective' judgments, which shouldn't be assimilated.) Be that as it may, Hume's own...