To add to my colleague’s excellent comment, one might think that, for manyof us at least, dying is such a stressful time--with respect to health,emotionality, family dynamics, etc.--that a dying person is in a relativelypoor position to form and communicate considered wisdom about life. To be sure, for some the perspective of one's imminent death might be usefuland constructive (as, for example, Hegel asserts when he defends the ethicalutility of warfare), but I suspect that popular culture tends to exaggeratethis possibility.

This question raises interesting issues about animal cognition. I tend totake a rather hard line on this—a view similar to one held by the stoics and bythe contemporary philosopher Donald Davidson---according to which (non-human)animal cognition is so different from human cognition that animals cannot give thesort of consent that humans use to justify their sexual interaction. So, my own answer to your question is this: If it is morally wrong to interactsexually interact non-human animals without consent, then this sexual contactis always wrong because that sort of consent is impossible to obtain. I suppose one who shared my view of animal cognition could take a hardline on this and say that it is morally acceptable to use non-human animals assexual objects for human pleasure, but I would disagree -- at the very leastKant is right that treating animals as ends is wrong because it tends to leadto cruel treatment of humans, and it is probably true that animals are worthyof much stronger moral...

Environmental philosophers have done a lot of work exploring what sort of "moral consideration" we should accord non-human life. For some discussion of this, see my answer to this question .

With respect to your own bad acts, isn't guilt often useful precisely because it can diminish the probability of you acting in that way in the future? So, I think the general answer is that you should take seriously the power of appropriate guilt. With respect to responding to bad actions performed by others, the best general answer is probably something uninteresting like "strive to respond to wrong in ways that are as rational and constructive as possible," and figuring out how to do that has everything to do with the specifics of the situations you confront. Douglas Walton's work on critical thinking is useful here, I think -- he adopts an interesting dialogical approach that focuses on understand the exact "contexts of dialgoue" of the most challenging and important situations we face and then provides concepts and tools that help make it easier to understand exactly what you need to do to respond to challenges in a a rational, constructive manner. (I especially like Walton's survey text, ...

I agree with Aaron that a central reason why taking performance enhancing drugs is wrong is that this action violates existing rules and so undermines standards of fairness that are so important to sport and to the enjoyment of sport by others. With respect to the content of these rules, I imagine that an historian of sports would have an interesting story to tell about the differing conceptions of competition that have been in place at various times and places, and I would bet that "fair sport" in the past has encompassed a variety of personal risks by athletes and many approaches for maximizing athletic skill and achievement. One could certainly imagine ethical defenses of rules and practices that admit more risk than our current rules--reducing harm is an ethical basis for those rules, but need not be the only basis for constructing rules about sport.

The the idea of caring about others' welfare is not rubbish, and reflecting on the consequences of our actions and thinking hard about ways that I can benefit connects to some of my deeply-held feelings about how I want to behave. I think it is also too strong to say that utilitarianism is rubbish as an ethical theory: we can learn a lot by exploring and assessing theories that address crucual issues even in a flawed way. That said, utilitarianism is severely flawed. I think the most important problems include the difficulty of defining welfare, of measuring it, and of making accurate and specific predictions about the consequences of our behavior. Other panelists can say much more, I'm sure, but in my opinion no satisfactory resolution to these problems is in sight.