I doubt whether we should feel that we ought always to treat everyone entirely equally to avoid being called racist. We are allowed to have preferences and sometimes these will be on racial grounds, perhaps, provided that those preferences do not systematically discriminate against people in ways that do them harm. Unless we had some fairly fixed preferences, it would be very difficult to discriminate among different sorts of people in any way whatsoever, and dating is based on such discrimination. It is as well to be aware of one's prejudices and to consider whether it is worth trying to challenge them, but there is nothing wrong in acknowledging them and recognizing their role in defining a personality. Blind dates are fun because they force the individual to respond to partners with whom one might not otherwise consider going. On the other hand, if every date were to be a blind date, this would not be evidence of having an open mind but rather of a lack of character.

Not necessarily. It might after all be in the interests of the majority of the population that the land is owned by a small minority. Perhaps they also deserve to own it, since they acquired it through hard work and merit. On the other hand, as you imply, this is unlikely so we are probably in the presence here of an unjust system.

We are harmed if species disappear, even if they are rather disagreeable to us on occasion, since the variety that exists in the world is diminished. The reasoning is not moral but aesthetic. Is it not better to live in an environment with more difference in it as compared to something that is uniform?

I think the point is that we should not expect people to behave exactly the same everywhere, so that in some countries women behave in ways which are culturally appropriate, and look oppressed from the perspective of other countries. Take the head scarf for example. Many interpret this as a sign of oppression, but many women in particular do not, and have no difficulty in both covering themselves to some degree and also believing in equal treatment with men. In Islam both men and women are supposed to dress modestly, and if that is taken to mean that women should cover their hair, and men also dress in certain ways, then there seems to be nothing unduly oppressive about that. Or at least no more oppressive than the feeling that women in any country will probably be expected to dress in a certain way. I think that is the logic that is operating here.

I wonder if the issue here is less about morality and more about privacy. A whole variety of things gives people sexual pleasure, and provided they do not harm others we might well not be critical of them, however strange they might be or even sometimes illegal. After all, just looking at someone's face might do it, or their eyes, or just their actual presence. On the other hand, in the examples you provide there is definitely the sense of someone's privacy being invaded, in that we do not ordinarily expect to be viewed in the situations described. And someone looking at us when we do not expect to be looked at often produces a sense of violation. Here issues of privacy shade into issues of morality, since surely we are entitled to expect certain aspects of our lives to be under our control and not broadcast in public without our consent and knowledge. The primary issue here is not the pleasure that someone else takes at seeing us when we do not want or expect to be seen, but our reasonable...

I don't think one can define any apriori indecent actions, that is, any actions that would always be taken to be indecent. It is remarkable how standards change, and in fact explicitly sexual behaviour is not anymore regarded as indecent by many people, although it remains illegal in most countries. When it comes to public standards of acceptable behaviour which do not make an explicit link with morality, anything goes. The only way to define some general standards of indecency would be to establish some link between them and morality itself, and that of course is very difficult. Parents of young girls are often shocked at their fashion sense, in that the latter often want to dress in sexually provocative ways, entirely out of line with their ages. Yet the girls themselves despite their clothes often display no great interest in sex or proclivity for sexual misbehaviour, as socially defined for their age range. Unless we can show that the standards of decency mesh in some way with the rules of...

You do touch on a very important issue here which occurs to those of us who work in the philosophy of cultures that are not directly our own. How much do we miss since we are not the original audience, as it were, of the philosophers from that culture? On the other hand, it also seems to me that we are very far from the original audience that Plato and Aristotle had in mind, yet many of us think we can get some grasp of Greek philosophy. How far is philosophy all the same and how far is it culturally specific? It is remarkable how similar ideas crop up irrespective of culture, so most philosophers are interested in similar issues to do with truth, value, knowledge and so on, although it is certainly true that different cultures emphasize different issues in different ways. There was a debate on this topic over a thousand years ago in the court at Baghdad. One philosopher argued that Greek philosophy was irrelevant to Muslims since it is based on Greek culture, and that has nothing to do with Islam...

There is at least one difference. The hard sciences are capable of predicting what is going to happen before it does. The social sciences have great difficulty explaining why something happened in the way it did even after it happened, and very little success in predicting the future.

Certainly, one can consult a variety of methods of determining if today is Tuesday, and once one knows that, bingo, the problem is solved.

I don't think it is quite that easy to extract a baby from a mother and for it to survive as you suggest. Even if it were and if we were to regard the fetus as having the same rights to life as its mother, there are reasons to prioritize the life of the mother. She is already alive while we do not know if the fetus will make it to life outside the womb. We have the choice between keeping someone alive who is already alive or letting her die in order that she bear someone who might not live after all. Many people do not think it is acceptable to abort a fetus even if this is done to save the mother's life since they see this as doing evil in order that good may result, a principle they reject. Anyone who holds that view cannot carry out the sort of thinking just produced here. If we are able to make a decision about who lives and who dies there is something to be said in favor of allowing someone to live who is already alive. It is not like redistributive taxation, where we take some money from the...