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Knowledge

What does it mean to say that it is impossible for there to be such a thing as a neutral, or objective, observer? When a person walks into a white room that it empty except for themselves and a chair, is asked to describe the room and says "It's a white room with a chair in it", it would seem that the situation they are in meets all the usual criteria for objectivity and neutrality. Certainly, it might be debatable whether the chair is a chair or a stool or a bench, and whether the white is really white or has been marred beige-grey by time, but either way, operating with a definition of chair and a definition of white, the conclusion is inevitable. So when philosophers say objective judgements are impossible, where do such banal statements about the physical world fall in?

There are some philosophers who think that human observations will always be from some subjective point of view. Indeed, modern philosophers have often thought that the secondary properties of objects (how an object looks, what it smells like, for example) will reflect the cognitive powers of observers. And some philosophers known as nonrealists will claim that there is no unique, "objective" description of the world. The white room with the chair might be described in terms of room or chair parts or as filled with only a slice of the spatio-temporal object of the room. But many philosophers in the past and today think that observations can be fair, free of bias and what one might call objective. I am pretty much in the realist camp and believe that "banal statements" can be assessed in terms of truth or falsehood in a pretty problem-free fashion. The state of affairs of 'There being a white room with a chair in it' is something that one can see and confirm. The fact that the very notion of a chair...
Ethics

Why are insults that refer to a person's personality, lifestyle or hobbies considered more acceptable (or at least less serious) than insults to a person's race, sex or disability? I used to think that it was because personality, lifestyle and hobbies are mutable, whereas race, sex and disability are things a person has no control over - yet there are plenty of examples to the contrary (Many personalities don't change without outside intervention; transsexuals change their physiological sex; disabilities can be the result of one's own voluntary actions; Micheal Jackson went white; etc.). Not only that, but why should it matter whether or not a person has control over the things being made fun of? I only see two possibilities. First, it could be a question of fairness - in which case, why is it fair to insult things that a person can change but that are nevertheless a part of them as human beings? This brings me to the second possibility - maybe we are implicitly endorsing a norm like "If the insults...

Great questions and suggestions! Perhaps, though, one needs to back up a bit and consider whether anything we would call an insult is morally in the clear. Off hand, it strikes me that there is a huge difference between offering criticism about some practice or a person's behavior and insulting a practice or person's action. Isn't an insult a matter of abuse or defemation or to slur someone? If I give a student paper a C, have I insulted the student? It may feel that way, and I suppose it would be an insult if I intended to abuse the student and diminish his sense of self-worth (imagine that on a fair minded assesment the paper merits an A and I have a personal grudge against the student). In that sense, I suppose I would be not just insulting the student but I would be an embarassment to my profession and to my school. So, off hand, it seems that insults (by their very nature) are not good. I do not suggest you disagree, because you do describe insults in terms of disrespect, but I thought it...
Business

Some businesses use incentive schemes to draw in customers; I want to know about whether or not such schemes abuse human psychology or are otherwise immoral. Let me give an example. Imagine a sandwich shop that sells sandwiches for 2$ each; they decide to change the scheme, so that now, every time one buys four sandwiches, the fifth sandwich comes free of charge. To compensate, they raise the price of the sandwiches to 2,50$, meaning that either way, the customers end up paying 10$ for every five sandwiches. Yet people, especially newcomers to the shop unfamiliar with the old prices, buy more sandwiches than before because, hey, there's a free sandwich in there! The shop begins to earn more than its competitors, and garners more long-term customers who pay more of their money for the sandwiches, by exploiting a loophole in human psychology. The sandwiches are in all relevant respects identical, yet people are paying more because of a freebie scheme. Is this an ethically legitimate practice? Or...

Great case! It is difficult to say (or say clearly) that the practice is unethical for, after all, the competition could offer a similar scheme. Any number of practices seem ethically permissible that would give the shop an edge, e.g. the opportunistic shop owner might offer customers who buy four sandwiches a flower or give $2.50 to charity, and so on. But there is some kind of exploitation insofar as the shop is taking advantage of costumers not knowing the past practice (and so not realizing that they are not getting an advantage over other competitors), plus the shop might have to spend more money to expand the size of the shop insofar as their customers start getting larger and larger from eating all those bloody sandwiches! Apart from perhaps placing customers at some health risk from consuming massive numbers of sandwiches, it does not appear (to me) to involve immoral or unethical action.
Ethics

Can empathy cause people to be immoral? Like if you empathize with a criminals motives will that lead you to excusing them?

It seems that while "empathy" and "sympathy" come from the term for "feeling with" and so might simply refer to your being able to understand affectively what another person is going through, we sometimes do use the terms to indicate more than a shared understanding. So, when someone says they empathize with why someone committed a crime, it seems they are claiming that the action was intelligible or it made some kind of sense. Read in this more supportive fashion, I suppose you are right or, putting things differently, you may want to be careful of your own property if you know someone who empathizes with people who love to steal all the time. But stepping away from this supportive sense of 'empathize,' we have good reason to think that ideal moral reflection would include some degree of affective understanding of all the parties involved. So, a judge who is determining what sort of penalty to give for a thief need not positively empathize with the robber, but we would expect the judge to have some...
Art

what is the difference between art & aesthetics?

Great question. 'Aesthetics' is usually used as a term to refer to two things: a field of inquiry and a type of experience. The field of aesthetics covers the philosophy of beauty and the philosophy of art. In the philosophy of art you cover questions about the very concept of art (what is the difference between art and non-art), the meaning and evaluation of artwork, and more. 'Aesthetics' is also used to refer to experiences that are emotive: an object has aesthetic properties insofar as it is experienced as gloomy, joyful, confused, angry, seductive, and so on. Some people connect art and aesthetics when they claim that an art object, X, is that which has been made with the intention that X be the object of aesthetic experience. There are all kinds of arguments about this.... Someone may object that given such a definition of a work of art, this reply to you is a work of art for I am intending it to be experienced aesthetically (I hope, for example, you find this reply friendly and helpful,...
Love

I am seventeen and dating a boy (man?) who is two years older than I. Our relationship is really going well, neither of us have any secrets and we feel comfortable talking about all subjects. Every moment I spend with him is valuable in a way I find hard to describe. Obviously, this has me thinking about long-term, very long-term. And my question for you wise men and women (who have much, much more experience than I) is this; can you truly know you love someone if you have only ever been with them? Can you even actually, whole-heartedly love someone if they are your only romantic and sexual partner? Especially since we are so young and facing many extended time periods apart. Are we too far from self-discovery, too apt to change to make it? I don't want to be naive, but I also want to have hope that this silly boy to whom I am so hopelessly committed to could someday be the man I spend my life with.

Your question or questions are very personal and very hard to settle. I think it is possible to know that you have found a life-partner romantically at a young age, but this must be very rare and there are so many cases of when people commit to each other too early and set themselves up for a costly break-up (emotionally) later. If I were in such a situation, I would enjoy my partner to the maximum possible, express love and joy, but hold off in terms of vows, not necessarily because I thought it good to be with others but because 17 is young, and what would be better than loving another person in the moment as a 17 year old, without planning what one might do when one is 21 or 25 or.... In terms of a philosophy of relationships, I am a fan of the poet Milton who proposed that the key to marriage (or a deep romantic relationship) is benevolence. He might have said friendship. In this line of thinking, one wants to make sure that there is both romance and friendship.
Ethics

Dear Philosophers, I have been dating a woman for one year. She's been away studying at a university in another country for the last few months, but is coming back soon. All the time we've been together, she's had some problems that I think were depression. But now she's become worse, so that it's having a big impact on her daily life. She's getting treatment abroad, but attitudes towards and treatment of mental health problems are terrible back here. Our conversations together are no fun at all - we only talk about her daily problems, which I can't help with at all. I feel like this is all too much for me. But I also feel (1) I have a responsibility to help her through this, (2) she might commit suicide if I left her, (3) that it would be callous to give up faith in her getting better. For my own sake, I think I should break up, but I don't know how much weight to give to the above three concerns.

This is clearly a very difficult matter and I feel quite unqualified to reply, but it sounds as though there is a middle ground between staying in a dating relationship and (to use your terms) break up, leave her, give up faith in her, being callous. I suppose there are some relationships which are either romantic or simply not on, but perhaps in your case there has from the beginning been a combination of romance and friendship? You seem deeply concerned about her over the year you have been together (plus you feel responsible for her now) and this seems to be a sign of the deep care one has as a friend and for a friend. Option 2 seems like a corrosive, unsustainable reason for continuing a romantic relationship (I would think that 2 would feel like entrapment), but I wonder if you might be able to work on 1 and 3 but as a friend without the dating. Philosophers from Plato onward have (from time to time) worked on a philosophy of friendship, and most of them have concluded that it is marked (at best)...
Logic

Is it logically contradictory for a person to say that they are humble, in a broad sense? After all, humility is generally considered a desirable quality.

Great question. It would be self-refuting for a person to arrogantly claim they are humble (assuming, I think correctly, that arrogance and humility are incompatable), but insofar as one can say (with humiility) that one is humble there is nothing practically or logically contradictory at stake (in my view). Perhaps the reason why we think it would be at least odd for a humble person to mention that she is humble is that we expect a humble person to not be self-conscious of the fact or feel the need to draw attention to herself and humility. The definition of humility is a bit tricky, though I suggest that it is different not just from vanity but from false humiility or excessive self-deprecation. The person who thinks she is the worst person in the world may not be humble at all, but wierdly narcissistic and full of self-hate or simply melodrama. A number of phiilosophers actually identify humility with proper pride. That may not seem intuitively right, but a good case can be made that a humble...
Ethics

Suppose that once a year, Alice donates $25,000 to a children's hospital, and that this sum allows them to hire a part-time employee to take care of the children. Bob, on the other hand, volunteers for twenty hours a week at an identical children's hospital, which saves them from having to hire a part-time employee that would cost them $25,000 a year. Some people might say that what Bob is doing is more ethically admirable than what Alice is doing, because Bob is dedicating time he can't get back, whereas Alice is "merely" throwing money at the hospital. Is Bob's behavior really more admirable than Alice's? If so, why? Why might we assume such a thing?

Great question(s). I wonder if we have simply different goods in play here rather than clear cut cases of greater and lesser goods. I wonder if there are at least four distinctions that may help us think through your question. I will do my best to dinstinguish a few of them, though in the end I suggest we may have to conclude that too many additional factors that are not specified in your case may cause us to alter our evaluation(s). Your point about time is really important. Someone who dedicates time for the hospital will not get that back (as you observe), but it might also be the case that someone who is giving the money to the hospital (but not volunteering) earned the money and will not get that time back that she spent getting the money. Still, maybe we can distinguish between types of what might be called Temporal Dedications or simply (and with less jargon) different types of ddications of time. Other things being equal, I suppose we think the person that dedicates more time to a...
Ethics
Religion

What reasons do atheists have for caring about other people or for being socially responsible? Is there any difference other than semantics that differentiates those reasons from reasons derived from religious beliefs? (in other words, reasons to care about others or for being socially responsible seem only to derive from one of two sources: (a) "enlightened expanded selfishness" (if we all do it the world is a better place), or (b) because somehow it is the "right" thing to do, and the only issue in this case is the source that makes it "right"). Whenever I discuss this question with self-professed atheists, their arguments come across as sounding like "I don't like the term 'god'" or "I don't like the bad things that have been done in the name of organized religion". In other words, they also believe in something greater than the individual and are arguing over what to call it or how to describe it or where its justification comes from, yet underneath it all, they spring from a belief that...

This seems like a very insightful interpretation of what may unite some compassionate secular persons with people of faith who are also compassionate agents today. I especially appreciate your implied view that persons of faith who care for others and are compassionate are not doing so simply in obedience to (for example) divine commands. Both the religious and secular person may well transcend narrow self-interest, but I suggest there still is a significant difference between the two. A religious person in the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition as well as in Hinduism and Buddhism and other faiths believe that there is something sacred about caring for others. For Abrahamic faiths,for example. it is not only good to care for others because they are valuable in themselves, but also because they are created and loved by God. I am not suggesting that people who are secular and compassionate are thereby at a disadvantage or somehow working with an impaired view of vaues. Someone like George Kated ...

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