Not better in any sense I can think of. On the "set punishment" question: I'm struggling to think what the point of inflexible sentencing laws would be given that the circumstances can vary in ways that seem clearly to be relevant. On the second question: the way you phrase it seems to provide the answer. If a 5-year sentence for littering is more aggressive than needed, then it's more aggressive than needed . Of course, if we had really harsh penalties for minor offenses, very few people would commit them. But the ones who did would be punished much more severely than their transgressions would justify. That seems like a high cost. Also, the citizenry would live in fear---another high cost. Mistakes in the judicial process would lead to innocent people bearing burdens that would be unreasonable even if they were guilty, and there would be reason to fear that laws like this would be abused and used to target unpopular minorities; that already happens as things stand. It's hard to see how what...

I'm not quite as happy with Prof. Kraus's way of putting things. I'd suggest having a look at this review by philosopher/physicist David Albert: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html As for whether something has always existed, Prof. Maitzen and I may well agree, but there's some ambiguity here that's worth thinking about. If we say that something has always existed, the most plausible way to understand that is that there has never been a time when nothing existed. If there's no time before the Big Bang, then we can say that something or other has always existed. Suppose, however, that there are times earlier than the Big Bang. One possibility is that what there was is an earlier cycle in an oscillating universe. In that case, the "something" was the sort of thing that's around in this phase of cosmic history. Another possibility is that what was around was the vacuum of quantum field theory. The vacuum, indeed, is not matter, but it's...

I think the best answer is that there's no one answer. Let's start with the easiest of your questions: you've read a biography of someone you've never met. Do you know them? Most people would say "No" because when we say things like "I know Robin," we generally mean that we are acquainted with Robin--have actually met Robin. Knowing about someone is knowledge by description but not by acquaintance, to borrow Bertrand Russell's terms. In the other cases, there's no simple answer because the terms "mere acquaintance," "friend," "close friend" and so on aren't precise; there's no cut-off. It's like the case of baldness. There's no exact point at which a formerly hirsute person becomes unequivocally bald.* The case you've focused on is an instance of a very general phenomenon. Some people are definitely tall, some are not tall, and some are on the border. Some bananas are definitely ripe, some are not, and for some there's no definite right answer. As you can see, it would be easy to make a very...

If I understand correctly, you're asking whether it would be acceptable to seek some sort of revenge now against someone who robbed you of a small sum 15 years ago. I don't know where you live, but in many jurisdictions the statute of limitations would have expired. (In New York, for example, the statute of limitations for robbery is five years.) That would mean that you have no legal recourse. Harming the robber or stealing from him would also not be acceptable. It would be a case of taking the law into your own hands and even if there are cases where that's acceptable, it's hard to see that this is one of them. Also: you say you want to find thief. But what are the chances of that happening? Would you even recognize him 15 years after the fact? And even if you think you would, this is the sort of thing people can easily get wrong. So you run the risk of wreaking vengeance on the wrong person. Moreover, you say that the trauma has lasted and left you with emotional scars. You say that an act of...

I'm having a bit of trouble coming up with a realistic picture of what this classless society would look like. People have different skills, talents, affinities, backgrounds... and in the normal course of things it's no surprise that classes form. It's true that governments spend time and resources ameliorating some of the more vicious effects of class differences, but humans being what they are, I'd guess that the only way to avoid the formation of classes altogether would be by means of heavy-duty coercion. That, however, would almost certainly come from the government, and so enforcing the classless society might well make the job of government harder, not easier. Or so I'd guess.

Depends on what you mean by "account for life." Many living things aren't conscious at all. On the other hand, if consciousness is a matter of physical goings-on, then it's possible that something could be conscious without being a living thing at all---at least, not in the biological sense. Human consciousness, of course, is consciousness in a living creature, but it doesn't follow that talking about life will add anything to our understanding of consciousness. More important, there's a danger here of missing Strawson's point. Strawson is concerned with the qualitative character of consciousness---with what's it's like to smell the smell of coffee or feel a pounding headache or a frisson of delight. Strawson's view, which he identifies with Bertrand Russell's, is that physics doesn't tell us anything about the intrinsic qualities of matter; physics only deals with mathematical structural properties. Strawson, with Russell, thinks that conscious episodes acquaint us with the intrinsic albeit...

Pets already can't decide whether whether they want to eat kibble, whether they want to be walked on a leash, whether they want to stay indoors most of the day, whether they want to hold their water in until their owners get home, whether they want to be spayed or neutered, nor, for that matter, whether they want to be pets at all. Pets are different in a lot of ways from their undomesticated counterparts. If interfering with their "natural behavior" is wrong, then keeping pets at all is already a problem. So long as the vegan pet food is nutritionally adequate and doesn't cause the animal any distress, it's hard to see why it would be more wrong (if wrong at all) than any of the other things we've mentioned.

Since the word "deontological" covers a lot of territory, I'm going to start with an assumption: I'm assuming that for you, the deontological point of view is non-consequentialist and broadly Kantian: it says that we can't treat people as mere means to an end, even if the end is otherwise a good one. (If that's not what you mean, my apologies.) If we have a mandatory vaccination rule, on the surface it's all about consequences: it's to protect people from preventable illnesses. But if we make people get their kids vaccinated even if they'd rather not, that sounds like treating them as means to the end of protecting others, even if there are other values at issue from their point of view. So your question is whether letting them opt out by home schooling their children is enough to make the rule acceptable. We already have such a rule for parents who prefer not to send their children to public school. If that's okay, is there any reason to think a similar rule wouldn't do in the case of vaccinations? ...

Suppose I make a promise to you. Then I've taken on a commitment. If I promise to drive you to the airport at 2:00 tomorrow, then I'm not free to do something else at 2:00 tomorrow. That is, I'm not free if I take my promise seriously. Of course, in another sense I'm free as a bird: I could just break my promise. Insofar as I'm not free, it's because I've bound myself, so to speak. But unless you've extracted the promise under duress, I took on the commitment freely, and taking on and keeping commitments is one of the ways we exercise and demonstrate our freedom. There's not just one thing we mean when we say someone is free. If you're locked up, you're not free to leave for external reasons. If you don't have certain capacities, then for internal reasons, you're not free to do things that call for them. (In that sense, I'm not free to sing the high F in the Queen of the Night's aria from the Magic Flute.) And then there's not being free because of restrictions you impose on yourself by choice. But...

You write that one response of professional philosophers is "they don't let the doubts affect their lives, which is contrary to what an intellectually capable human being (i suppose philosophers are of course) should do " Here's my question: why is this what an "intellectually capable human being" should do? I don't think that's even remotely obvious. There's more or less nothing that I couldn't bring myself to doubt if I really tried. Maybe 1+2 = 3 is an exception. On the other hand, 5879+3627=9506 is something I likely could get myself to feel unsure about with a lot of effort. But so what? It's consistent to doubt any empirical proposition. And it's psychologically possible to doubt a lot of non-empirical propositions by worrying about whether one's cognitive engine has gone on the fritz. But while all of this is true, it seems to me to have no force. The best way I've ever seen anyone make the point is the way my one-time colleague Dudley Shapere used to put it: The possibility...