Well, weakness of will is a human frailty, and philosophers are humans. But I share your intuition that someone who has accepted strong arguments for a conclusion, such as "It is wrong to eat meat," and who faces few difficulties acting on that conclusion, should be able to act on it. It may make you feel better to know that there is a much higher proportion of consistent vegetarians among philosophers than among the general population. But people who study ethics may be no different than other philosophers (except that they condemn meat eating more). See here . Personally, I think that there are good reasons for our society to shut down factory farming (it causes a lot of unnecessary suffering, hurts the environment, and contributes to unhealthy eating habits). But it is not obvious how best to act on that view. I try to avoid factory farmed meat, but mainly to avoid hypocrisy rather than to further the cause (my not purchasing meat is unlikely to have an effect on the industry). But...

I want to add a point of emphasis to Prof. Stairs' excellent response to your interesting question. It is quite common to hear people suggest that being tolerant or respectful towards the moral views of other people or other cultures suggests a commitment to moral relativism. It sounds like that's what people were suggesting to you. That idea is false and might even be self-contradictory. If your being tolerant or respectful is based on your thinking that it is morally right to take a tolerant or respectful attitude towards other people (in the way Stairs suggests in third paragraph), then it might be that you take it to be a universal moral truth that one should take such an attitude towards others (barring moral reasons not to do so--e.g., because their views or behavior call for harsher attitudes). That most liberal, politically correct people are not really relativists is suggested by the fact that most of them are not tolerant or respectful towards people who hold intolerant...

Assuming one doesn't take the skeptical view that no one is really responsible for anything (in the sense of justifiably deserving anger, punishment, etc.), then I think the answer to your question is that we are responsible for bad outcomes we do not intentionally bring about if we were negligent--that is, if we did not take precautions to prevent a bad outcome that we should have know was probable if we failed to take such precautions. In the case of your sister, it seems she was negligent. She should have (and could have) turned off the tap, and she presumably knew that failing to do so might cause significant problems. But the details matter. Did she have reason to believe that leaving a tap on will cause flooding (was the drain closed)? Were there mitigating circumstances (e.g., something distracted her in a such a way that it is reasonable to think would distract most people from remembering to turn off the tap)? Again, without getting into the complexity of the free will debate, which...

I can think of only two ways that your actions in virtual reality are "subject to ethical criteria" (i.e., are appropriate targets of ethical judgment). First, if they somehow have effects on real people (for instance, if you have virtual reality sex and your spouse finds out about it). Second, if your virtual reality actions shape your beliefs or character in ways that make you more likely to behave unethically in the real world. For instance, having virtual reality sex or killing virtual reality characters in a video game might make you more likely to cheat on your spouse or to behave violently in the real world. I say "might" because, as far as I know, the research on this is either non-existent or inconclusive (though I think there is some good evidence that children who play a lot of violent video games are more prone to violence). This offers a nice example of how ethical theory depends in part on facts about our moral psychology. Virtue theory suggests that our ethical behavior...

You would probably appreciate this recent column in The New York Times on whether it is ethical to eat peas (and other plants): http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/28/if-peas-can-talk-should-we-eat-them/ I didn't. I thought it was pretty stupid. Why? Because the sort of "communication" that plants may be capable of does not seem relevant to being an object of ethical concern (which is not to say that we may not have ethical duties to protect the environment, including animals and plants). I'm not sure you are right that more than a few people think insects have ethical value. Heck, given the way we treat and eat factory farmed animals, I'm not sure many people think mammals and birds (other than their pets) have ethical value or deserve ethical consideration. Personally, I think people are wrong about the mammals and birds, probably right about insects (and maybe fish), and certainly right about plants. Why? Because for me, the main reason (and minimal threshold) for a...

That is unsettling. If true. Most of your questions suggest that you're already assuming he is guilty of the crime. Perhaps you should try to do what the legal system aims to do: assume he is not guilty until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I'm not sure why the police are interviewing you, but you should probably "stick to the facts" and describe your former roommate's behavior and habits, leaving them to interpret whether that offers any relevant evidence to this crime. To me, that would make you a more "reliable witness." Now, if he is guilty, then I think it's an interesting question whether he had "the seed of a murderer in him," though it's not clear what that might mean. It may also be an interesting question whether you could have done anything differently such that things might have turned out differently (again, assuming they turned out the way you are assuming). But it's also a question that is almost impossible to answer, certainly without finding out a lot more...

I agree with Professor Smith. The only thing I would add may be obvious and may be something you've already tried. It sometimes helps to have third parties intervene to provide all the facts and arguments you would use to try to persuade your wife to change her mind. Here, your knowledge of who might influence her is useful. Would she trust your family's pediatrician or react harshly against him/her as a member of the 'vaccine conspiracy'? Her parents or yours? Mutual friends? While an 'intervention' would be extreme, making friends and family aware of a serious issue that affects the health of your children (and others) and enlisting their help might make it easier for your wife to back down without feeling pressured to do so solely by you. But should these methods fail, then Prof. Smith's suggestion seems appropriate.

You've got it right. If one believes meat-eating is wrong and has reasons and arguments for that view, then one should offer those reasons and arguments to others to try to convince them to stop doing something wrong. The reason meat-eaters respond this way is presumably that they do not think they are doing anything wrong or they think that vegetarians' reasons for avoiding meat are subjective (e.g., they don't like the taste or feel they don't need it) or, more likely, they are trying to avoid confronting reasons, facts, and arguments that would make them have to give up something they like doing. Conversely, some vegetarians might not want to confront meat-eaters because they don't take their position for ethical reasons or because they think the harm involved in meat-eating is minimal enough that they don't need to try to change the world, even if they do think it's wrong enough that they don't want to engage in that practice. The latter view seems difficult to pull off consistently. I say...

I think the answer is that when we are considering how responsible people are for their beliefs and behavior, and considering how much blame they deserve, we think that the appropriate degree of responsibility and blame to ascribe depends in part on the degree to which the person (a) had the opportunity to know better and (b) was able to control her behavior accordingly. And we recognize that it is more difficult to know that X is wrong when most of the people in your society believe X is not wrong and have taught you that X is not wrong than it is to know that X is wrong when most people believe and teach that X is wrong. And even if one comes to understand that X is wrong, it is then more difficult to behave accordingly if most people in your society believe that X is not wrong and also set up systems to make it difficult to act against that belief. Figuring out exactly how difficult it was for the average American, especially in the South, to figure out that slavery is wrong is not...

Let me be clear before making my further comments: I think our killing bin Laden was justified and a good outcome, so I certainly disagree with the suggestion in your last question. Furthermore, I think the Taliban's killing a U.S. soldier is not a good outcome and 9/11 was a tragedy and morally abominable. Having said that, consider how we (Americans) feel when pictures of dead U.S. soldiers are publicized by our enemies (remember Mogadishu) or how we felt when we saw people (e.g., in Pakistan) celebrating after 9/11. So, privately celebrating (and feeling happy about) bin Laden's death may be an appropriate reaction for a variety of reasons (e.g., he deserved punishment for his crimes, it may reduce terrorism, etc.). But there are better and worse ways to celebrate. And doing so in large numbers in public seems inappropriate to me, both because it is likely to foment anger against us (and perhaps inspire terrorism) and because it does not seem the most dignified response. Regardless of who...