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Ethics

A girlfriend showed me a short story in which a group of women on a kibbutz broke the hymen of an infant girl in a ceremonial, ritualistic manner. The act deprived any male from doing so--a kind of preemptive strike against male dominace, violence, etc. My question is, was this choice ethical? Is belief in an ideology or movement like feminism reason enough to alter the body of an infant who cannot object? If Jews perform a bris on infant males as a foundational religious practice, why not accept hymen perforation on secular feminist grounds? Thanks for your consideration.

I hope others will also weigh in on this one, because I really find this kind of question quite complicated. On the one hand, I can understand your analogy to infant male circumcision: In both cases, a kind of decision that the child might wish to be able to make for him- or herself later in life is being taken away in infancy. This, indeed, seems to me to be one of the strongest reasons to oppose infant male circumcision and/or hymen perforation (or for that matter, any other non-essential modification to the body of an infant or minor child). On the other hand, there are also some disanalogies here, which may make significant differences. For one thing, the bris is now a well-establish and deeply ingrained religious ritual, with profound meaning within a religion in which it is regarded as a sign of a covenant with God, going back thousands of years. In the latter case, you are talking about considering whether starting what may or may not turn out to be a new ritual that has...
Ethics

I'm in a quandary. My question relates to when does a person's decisions about their own life become reliant on others' decisions; who should have the last say, as it were. My mother, an emigrant who returned to her own country, was recently widowed and has expressed a wish to return to the country where her children are, thus leaving her native country again. Her children, including me, have grave reservations as we think, amongst other considerations, that the trauma of the move may well impact on her health and actually shorten her life. I think she knows this and wants to move back anyway. Apart from all the obvious issues about grief and getting old and frail, for me a big issue is who am I to say she shouldn't come back? Because her decision would require co-operation of her children, does that mean our views should over ride hers? Because she is elderly, should our views have more validity than hers? I don't think there is a right or wrong solution to this but I would appreciate your thoughts. ...

As you say, there may be no simply right or wrong answer to your question. It is one that many of us whose parents are aging have to face, in different ways. But here are a few suggestions. First, I would propose (and can well imagine other philosophers reacting negatively, so stay tuned to see other reactions to your question!) that the best way to try to answer your question would be to avoid, as much as possible, trying to conceive of it in terms of one-size-fits-all general moral principles. If you and your other family members simply act on the basis of such principles, I think you will find that there are several that might seem to apply, and they may not all lead to the same results. And the worst risk of approaching it this way is that you find that you or other members of your family cannot actually LIVE in accordance with the supposedly right principle you settle on. Instead, start here: This is your MOTHER we are talking about. I hope there is love involved in this decision,...
Education
Philosophy

What makes philosophers such as Kant, Aristotle, and Plato (and the many others) able to gain and retain such vast amounts of knowledge? Are they somehow able to use more of their brain than others, or are they merely the same as everyone else yet they have chosen to read and learn more? At the same time... I wish to become as great as these philosophers. Here is the scenario I have in mind: I graduate school in June. Once I graduate, I have a stack of grammar books and philosophy books I have yet to read. Granted they are "beginner" philosophy/grammar books (such as "The Art of Making Sense 2/e", "The Elements of Moral Philosophy 3/e", The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle", "What Does It All Mean?", "The Elements of Style- Strunk and White 3/e" and "An Introduction to Language 3/e"), I aim to move upward and get into the heavy stuff soon. If I keep this steady flow of progression, in due time, will I become a great thinker? I feel as though I have wonderful thoughts circulating inside of my mind...

It sounds to me as if you are off to a great start, Steve. No one can really predict how one would become a Plato, Aristotle, or Kant. Greatness such as theirs, plainly, only comes very rarely and may skip many generations before appearing yet again. My advice, for what it is worth (not myself being anything even close to a Plato, Aristotle, or Kant!), is merely to aim to keep growing, intellectually, all of your life. Whether one's work ends up being regarded as great, or merely good, or mediocre, or simply foolish is not up to the one who does the work--it is up to those others who judge it. Because you have no control over what others will think of you and your ideas, I would urge you not to give too much attention to trying to achieve whatever they would require, in order to consider you great. Instead, find what it is that makes you passionate, that calls out for your attention to such a degree that you find your mind drifting back to it even when it is socially inappropriate to do...
Ethics
Sex

In Western culture, polygamy is generally considered immoral. Is there sufficient justification for this classification? Can it honestly be said that polygamy is wrong? I don't only mean one man/many wives but all the various possible arrangements of multiple partners, for instance one woman/multiple husbands, multiple husbands/multiple wives, etc.... There are some economic advantages to multiple adult partners living together. Take for example a situation where a man has two wives. The man works and so does one of the women. You now have a dual income household. The second woman does not work, but instead stays home and cares for any children and housekeeping duties. What would normally fall on one woman (working, housekeeping and child-rearing) is divided between two. It is assumed that all parties are consenting adults who consider themselves equal to one another. This has the added advantage of reducing the child day care costs so often frustrating for households with just two parents who...

I am inclined to think the original ground for anathematizing polygamy may be found in religions that oppose it for doctrinal reasons. I would be willing to wager that these same reasons continue to be the main source of such opposition. But it is not the only reason to be wary of polygamy. As a matter of fact, as it has actually been practiced (and is practiced in parts of the world where it is legal), it is almost always configured in ways intended to advantage men--at the expense of women. (A very dramatic example of this, involving a fundamentalist wing of the Latter Day Saints [Mormons] in Utah is not much in the news, for example.) As you say, there can be prudential advantages to being far more open about marital arrangements. But there can also be significant prudential disadvantages, as well: The more people intimately involved in a single household, the more potentials for serious conflict are added. Unless one lives in a society in which the relevant sorts of arrangements...
Ethics

I have background knowledge in philosophy but I now live in a place where I have discovered no source of any remote answer to the question about ethics which I formulate below. (Honestly). Three propositions follow: (1) Male cardinals are red (2) Hamburgers are delicious (3) Lying is wrong Consider (1) first. To dogs, the color blind, the blind simpliciter, or bees, male cardinals just aren't red. Male cardinals are not red in the same sense that there are 12 ounces of Budweiser in that can. My claim here is that it is actually FALSE that male cardinals are red. What's really true is that we PERCEIVE male cardinals to be red, and others do not. The same can clearly be said about (2), since hamburgers probably taste awful to vegetarian species. I see no reason why we can't similarly say that (3) is 'subjective' as well in that lying is only wrong because we experience the feeling that lying is wrong. Ethical theories like utilitarianism, deontology, divine command theory, etc. don't really...

If I reply that something has gone wrong in your reasoning, you will accuse me of begging the question! At any rate, that is what I think. Here's why: First of all, although I take your point that the redness of male cardinals is not something those who are color blind (or simply blind) can experience in the same way you or I do (assuming you are neither color blind nor blind), but that does not make the claim that male cardinals are red false ! It just means that its truth is not (easily) discernable to those unable to sense it directly. (After all, the redness of male cardinals could be established by measurements of the frequencies of light their feathers reflect. But perhaps now we can quibble about what "red" really means, so let's move to your main point. Before we do, however, note that my stipulation here shows that there IS an objective correlate, and that in the whole story of "red" there will be at least some reality "out there," as it were.) As for lying, the first thing I...
Ethics
Value

WHAT IS GOOD? DONALD S. AMHERST MA.

German chocolate cake is good! ;) Kidding aside, philosophers have identified several ways of trying to answer this question, and I will allow those whose views are different from mine to provide their own replies. As for me, I am inclined to follow the view of the ancient Greeks, who supposed that there may be several sorts of goods, but that ultimately the highest good for human beings is eudaimonia (a Greek word that is difficult to translate, but which is usually translated as "happiness" or--my own preference--as "flourishing"). But what is eudaimonia? Perhaps the clearest answer to this question is given by Aristotle in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics . There, Aristotle identifies the highest good for human beings as something that must be (a) distinctly human (hence pleasure, though generally good, cannot be the highest good for human beings), (b) something for the sake of which we do what we do, but which we choose for its own sake, and not only for the sake of some...
Education
Philosophy

Which philosophical texts are considered, generally, to be canonical (in the sense that any and everyone who either has an interest in philosophy or is studying it should have read them)?

The list of such texts will either be very long (if you allow that not absolutely all philosophers need to read each one), or else there will be no such list (if you insist that absolutely all philosophers should have read each one). Philosophy has come to have so many sub-disciplines that it is quite possible for someone to be very good in field X and yet never have read any of the basic texts in some other field(s). Also, the closer we get to the present day, historically, the more difficult it becomes to name the texts that are going to be the "classics" of philosophy. The safest answer to questions such as yours would be to look at the lists of texts taught in most history of philosophy classes (those covering ancient Greek through 19th Century European philosophy). What professors assign to their students in these classes are generally regarded as very important works of philosophy that good philosophers would do well to have read and understood.
Philosophers

I acknowledge that Descartes "Founder of Modern Philosophy" and the "Father of Modern Mathematics," ranks as one of the most important and influential thinkers of modern times. Obviously very influential and smart right? Well.... If this guy was so bright, then why did he believe that non-human animals were not sentient and therefore could not suffer or feel pain? This belief led him to accept vivisection as ethical. If you squeeze the skin of a cat violently and pinch it, it will scream in agony. My question is, how could a person supposedly brilliant and also striving to prove the existence of god and the infinite essence known as the soul in human beings found in meditations on first philosophy have the misconception that non-human animals cannot suffer? When inflicting vivisection or violent harm, the truth is SCREAMING at you in the face! I am boggled. Can somebody please shed some light on this supposedly wonderful mind of Descartes?

I hope others will chime in on this one, but here is a partial answer. The problem that lies behind your question is na version of what is called the "problem of other minds." The truth, as you put it, is actually not "SCREAMING at you in the face." Even Descartes would not have denied that cats will struggle and make loud noises when you begin to cut them open. The screaming, as you put it, is something that happens when cats are vivisected. The question--on which you and Descartes differ--is whether that screaming should be understood as a decisive indicator of whether the cat actually feels pain . Consider even another human being. You witness them suffering some injury, and they cry out. You assume they are feeling pain, and that is why they cry out, because when you injure yourself in the same or similar ways, you feel pain, and that is what makes you cry out. But if you think about it, the only pain--indeed, the only consciousness of any kind that you...
Philosophy
Science

When did it come to the point where science and philosophy were not the same thing, or at least in search for the same goal. An experiment here, a theory there, both being created by the thought of how to complete the experiment, or checking the pros and cons of a theory until it is as sound as one mind can allow. Are they not both in search for truth, thus intertwined for a singular outcome?

When? I think it was June 15, 1412 at 5:22 in the laboratory of... (just kidding!) I don't think such questions have very definite answers. "Philosophy" means "love of wisdom," and originally, any thoughtful example of truth-seeking counted as "philosophia"--the Greek word for philosophy. As you say, both are examples of our search for truth, and in that sense, both continue to interact, at various levels. However, one thing that distinguishes science is that it has a methodology tied to observations and experimentation, whereas much of what philosophers debate has not (yet, at any rate) lent itself to empirical resolution through observation and experimentation. We do "thought experiments" a lot of the time, but these results are not as reliable, as universal, or always replicable, in the ways that actual empirical experiments (which can be performed by anyone anywhere, with suitable equipment) are.
Language

This seem like an odd question and perhaps misplaced on this site but I am interested none the less. I was thinking about the definition of a car. You see, I've brought this up in conversation before and people are usually arrogantly dismissive of it, and say something like “it has 4 wheels and an engine!”; then I inform them that they've just described cars, forklifts, tractors, some planes etc... Then they realize that any true definition would require much more eloquence. But this is where I am stuck, as any definition I can think of does not omit other non-car vehicles or does not include the myriad of car forms. The fact that what is a car is obvious to the observer is testimony to the fact that there is a working definition of it, and if we fail to find one then, to me at least, it suggests that there is some uniquely car trait that we have yet to quantify. I suppose the broader question this raises is are definitions meaningful anyway?

Most historians of philosophy agree that definitional questions were introduced as the special province of philosophy by Socrates, who asked them about virtue-terms, and thus invariably exposed the ignorance of his interlocutors. Socrates is also sometimes said to have committed "the Socratic fallacy," which is (roughly) the claim that unless you have knowledge of the definition, you can't know anything else about the thing to be defined, including that any instance of it really is an instance. Some very prominent scholars continue to think that Socrates believed in this kind of epistemological priority of definition, which your car example shows well would be a fallacy (if indeed Socrates held such a view, though I have argued in my published work that he did not). Anyway, of course you can know that a certain Chevy Impala is a car, even if you don't know how to define "car." So definitional knowledge is plainly not epistemologically prior to our ability to know instances. I am not...

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