John Stuart Mill argued that offense to others is not a permissible ground for a legal prohibition of conduct -- "that the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient reason" ( On Liberty , chapter 1). But then Mill also stretched the notion of harm in various ways so as to reaffirm prevailing prejudices about what conduct it is permissible to proscribe. To think about your question carefully, one needs to start with a sharp definition of offense which supports a clear distinction between offense and harm . (Joel Feinberg's work has a lot to offer on this score.) This is a difficult task, and it is quite likely that our linguistic intuitions about what is harm and what is mere offense are shaped by our moral intuitions about what may and may not rightfully be proscribed by the criminal law. Here are a few examples of...

There are obviously different readings of Kant's relevant texts as well as different views on what is the systematically most plausible interpretation of his phrase. With this caution, let me give it a try. Treating someone as a mere means contrasts with treating her or him also as an end in itself, as a person whose dignity and whose permissible ends have conduct-guiding importance. This suggests that we need to describe your two cases in a bit more detail. One more detailed description might depict tennis player A as wholly indifferent to B's dignity and to the fulfillment or otherwise of B's permissible ends. Here A helps fulfill B's end of playing a good game of tennis, but only because this serves A's own end to do the same. Should A come across an opportunity to take advantage of B (ridiculing B in public to good effect, exploiting a financial emergency, etc.), A would readily do this so long as A is confident of finding a comparable substitute partner in the event that B no longer wants...

Ranking these dimensions is impossible, I believe. You cannotcompare dimensions as such, but at best only specific differencesacross dimensions. Consider, for example, whether teaching experienceis moreimportant than awards. Well, a large advantage in teaching experiencewill outweigh some small advantage in awards, and a large advantage inawards will outweigh some small advantage in teaching experience. Inorderto compare advantages across dimensions, we would need a metric withineach dimension as well as a standard of comparison across thesedimensions. We might then be able to conclude that, say, teachingexperience is more important than awards in the sense that a smalleradvantage in teaching experience outweighs a larger advantage inawards. But such a conclusion presupposes cross-dimensional comparisons ofmagnitudes. There are two further difficulties. First, dimensions that receive a lot of attention from some mayreceive very little attention from others or none at all. Employers have quite...

We use language to draw distinctions of various kinds. Some suchdistinctions are binary -- such as that between prime and nonprimenatural numbers or that between pregnant and nonpregnant female personsand animals. Other such distinctions are scalar -- such as that betweenobjects called long or short, fast or slow, North or South, suggestinga scale along which things can be ordered. Yet other such distinctionsare plural -- such as the distinctions we draw by means of colorpredicates. As your example brings out, distinctions ofdifferent kinds can sometimes be applied within the same space. In thespace of colors, for instance, we might operate with a simple binarydistinction (blue/nonblue) or with a scalar distinction (bright/dark)or with a plural distinction (mauve/crimson/turquois/...). Similarly,in regard to CD collections, we might operate with a simple binarydistinction (unique/nonunique) or with a more complex scalar or pluraldistinction. Which kind of distinction we employ typicallydepends on...

"Every scenario I can think of proves otherwise," you write, but where is the proof? The mere fact that, for every piece of conduct I point to, you can think up a selfish motive does not prove your point because the motive you thought up may not be the agent's real motive. What you have in mind, as proof, may be something along these lines: The fact that the agent did what she did proves that she preferred it over her alternative options. So she followed her preference and acted selfishly. But this line of thought conflates a conceptual point (the option an agent chooses = the option the agent prefers = the selfish option) with a substantive insight. This is clear from the fact that the conceptual point does not rule out that an agent may (prefer to) do, for the sake of others, what she regards to be worse for herself. Indeed, she may sacrifice her own life for another. One could respond that she must have regarded what she did as best for herself, for otherwise she would/could not have...

I have written something about what philosophy ought to be in my response to question 1075 . Insofar as philosophers have lived up to this mission they have contributed greatly to society. They have given us clearer, richer, fuller ideas of justice, virtue, friendship, exploitation, democracy, human rights, art, reasons, truth, time, causality, personal identity, death, love, well-being, and so on. These ideas have enlightened public discourse and enriched many individual lives. Because the effects of what philosophers do are far more indirect than the effects of the work of inventors or politicians, any hypothesis about how much of a difference they have made to human history is highly conjectural. But human history would surely have gone quite differently if Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, or Kant had not broadcast their ideas and arguments. To be sure, there are many grave defects in our lives and social institutions. But, with the aid of philosophy, we can better understand these defects and, if there...

Indeed, there's no easy way in. But you would do a great deal better beginning with the Philosophy of Right (or the Phenomenology ) than with, say, the Logic . Hegel's Philosophy of Right is hard, but no harder, in my view, than Kant's Metaphysics of Morals or Aristotle's Metaphysics . And the effort to understand this work by Hegel is well worth the effort.

The reason for this is weaker in the case of organizations than in the case of societies -- mainly because the former are much easier to leave or to avoid altogether. If you don't like the undemocratic structure of General Motors or the Catholic Church, you can decline to join these organizations or exit fairly easily, perhaps finding another job or becoming self-employed, or joining another denomination or none. By contrast, people born into an undemocratic society could not avoid this fate and typically find it quite hard to exit: They must find another country willing to accept them and must then uproot themselves and move there. One can then say that, in the case of organizations, the resons for mandating democracy are outweighed by considerations of freedom: If people want to belong to a hierarchal corporation or church, there is some reason to give them this option. This sort of answer is pretty standard (suggested by Rawls and many others). But for it to work, it must really be fairly...

I think Will Kymlicka's Contemporary Political Philosophy is a very good text for beginners. It may be a little harder than what you're looking for, but it's a standard work now, one likely to have influenced the exam and those who mark it. It's broad and covers well the main schools of thought. The same is true to a somewhat lesser extent of Adam Swift's Political Philosophy: A Beginner's Guide for Students and Politicians . Swift is a British author teaching at Oxford.

A rule cannot be proven by there being an exception (a case that violates this rule). So the point of the saying must be that the rule -- understood loosely as a pattern that holds generally or for the most part -- is proved by the fact that a case violating it is recognized as an exception (as exceptional). For example, you say that John is lazy. I point out that John climbed Wheeler Peak in 1982. You say that the exception proves the rule -- meaning that the exceptionality of the cited counter-instance (I had to go back 24 years to find a good one) confirms your point that John is generally and for the most part lazy.

Here is a third answer focusing on the actual history of the expression: www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-exc1.htm