I think it might be helpful to unravel a couple of things here. Let's start by way of an example. Bob and Sally work for the same organization. To avoid irrelevant issues, let's suppose it's a generally well-run non-profit, much admired for its good work. Suppose Bob is bragging over drinks that he routinely pads his expense account in various hard-to-detect ways and gets reimbursed for a lot more than he's actually spent. Sally says: "That's unethical. You shouldn't do that." Bob replies: "Who gave you the right to define what's ethical for me?" Bob's response is shallow to say the least. Sally isn't "defining" what's wrong for him. What Bob is doing is wrong, period. It's not just that his employer has the right to make this kind of theft grounds for firing. That's true, of course, and so his bosses can "define" at least this much of the code Bob has to abide by if he wants to stay out of trouble. But even if the company never says any such thing and never formulates any such policy, Sally is right...

I'd suggest that the line isn't really very sharp. Here's a case: you are at the door. you see someone who's struggling under a burden of carried boxes. You aren't the worst person in the world if you don't hold the door, but you really should - and not just in some conventional sense. Why? One reason: you'd hope others would do the same for you in similar circumstances. That's an ethical consideration. Still, there are some things that really are matters of custom. It's said (can't say for sure if it's true) that in some cultures, belching at the end of a meal is a way to compliment the host. That's not so in other societies (US society, for example.) There's obviously no general answer to the question "To belch or not to belch?" However... Here in the USA, if I deliberately belch at the end of a meal and embarrass my host, I can't plead that it's a compliment in some countries, and I also can't plead that my act is a mere violation of custom, hence not really wrong. Customs are part of what...

I'd like to suggest that it's not an all-or-none affair, but yes: rationality is part of free will. One way to think about it is to ask what kind of "free will" would be worth caring about. A will that's not able to respond to reasons is one I wouldn't want to have, and any sense in which it would be "free" seems to me to be pretty Pickwickian. This point doesn't settle the question of how free will and determinism are related. Robert Kane's version of libertarianism, for instance, doesn't call up any obvious conflict between free will and reason. That's partly because reason doesn't always dictate a single course of action. It would be reasonable of me to work on my administrative duties for the rest of the afternoon, and also reasonable to spend the time on research. But it wouldn't be reasonable to tear off my britches and run naked into the street, and I don't think the fact that this would be beyond me (absent a very good reason) to mean I don't have free will. So yes: little glitches in our...

I'll speak for myself, but I think there are lots of other philosophers who would agree. For me it's not a matter of turf. There are people who weren't trained as philosophers but who have made serious contributions to philosophy. To take but one example, I have a colleague whose formal training was entirely in physics -- all the way to the PhD level. But he's an excellent philosopher. Philosophers would need to be very careful about laying claim to any stretch of intellectual territory -- not least because so much of contemporary philosophy is "Philosophy of X," where X is some discipline like physics or psychology. Richard Dawkins has as much business talking about religion as I do; I just wish he'd do it a bit less ham-fistedly. And while I have enormous respect for Hawking as a physicist, he simply hasn't done his homework when he makes pronouncements about the death of philosophy; he appears to have very little idea what sophisticated philosophers actually have to say. So I'm happy to...

I hear two things in what you say. One is that, quite understandably, you want to deal with your sorrow. The other is that you want a "serious, fair and moral" way past your situation. But I'm not sure these amount to the same thing. When it comes to curing heartache, philosophers have no special expertise. A philosopher could offer you some obvious platitudes, including the suggestion that if you are really having trouble coping, there's no shame in seeking professional help, but a philosopher is not a doctor of the soul On the other part of your plea, there may be a bit that a philosopher could say. You've accepted — intellectually, at least — that your former fiancé has lost her regard for you and that this is something you brought on your self. She is entitled to get on with her life, and the right thing to do is to respect that. But you're also looking for some way to atone and make amends. Making amends may not be possible, because making amends isn't the sort of thing that can just...

You're not the first person to find some of Socrates' reasoning a bit slippery; there are many philosophers who would agree. But a suggestion: if you want to get a good introduction to philosophy, working though Plato's Republic on your own is probably not a good way to do it. out Plato Philosophy is a live discipline, and most of the people who practice it don't spend much time thinking about Plato. Better to start with something written a lot more recently -- Simon Blackburn's Think is a possibility as a place to start, but you might also consider good introductions to special topics, such as Robert Kane's A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will , for example.

Many philosophers (and many non-philosophers, for that matter) think that whether something is right of wrong is at least partly a matter of consequences. If smoking were good for people, it might be a good thing to encourage them to do it. Since smoking is unhealthy, it's wrong to encourage it. More generally, it looks like you're assuming something doubtful: that whether something is right or wrong is always something about the thing itself. That's what I take your point about the connection between promiscuity and disease to be. You seem to be saying that if promiscuity really is wrong, it must be because of something about its very nature rather than something about the consequences of being promiscuous. But why would we think that? A couple of caveats. First, thinking about consequences isn't simple. In the case of promiscuity, for example, there are many kinds of consequences we might want to take into account, and some of them -- how our way of living general affects our relationships...

I'm going to stick with the first bit: how could making an offer be exploitation? Suppose I seek out someone in desperate circumstances and make them an offer that I know they can't afford to refuse but that I also know isn't fair and that they would never take if they weren't so desperate. I am taking deliberately taking advantage of their dire circumstances. That's exploitation. There's room to argue about cases, but the general idea seems clear enough.

I think there's a way to do honor to both sides. What makes works of art valuable isn't independent of human experience. It has something to do with the kinds of responses they call forth in us, though there's no simple story to be told about this. Philosophers sometimes put this by saying that aesthetic value is response-dependent . It's hard to imagine what we could mean by saying that a work of art was aesthetically valuable even though given the way we're wired, more or less no humans would ever find it valuable. And so there is a "subjective" element to aesthetic value: subjective in the sense of depending on how we respond to things. That gets us started, but it also seems to open the door to the response that it's all just a matter of subjective taste: I like chocolate, you don't and there's nothing more to be said. So let's turn to Britney vs. Beethoven. The first point is that there's no need to deny that a Britney Spears song can have real value. This is true even though some...

An interesting puzzle. Here's at least one possible explanation. There are some things I agree with, but I can fairly easily imagine changing my mind. In cases, this possibility seems much more remote. For example: suppose my department is deciding between two job candidates, Jimenez and Grabowski. A colleague makes her case for hiring Jimenez. I think about it and say "I agree." And I really do. But the idea that someone might go for Grabowski doesn't seem crazy to me, and I can imagine that a conversation with another colleague might persuade me to re-think. However, we can imagine another case: the choice is between Abel and Zed and it's not just that I believe Abel to be the better candidate; it's that there just seems to me to be no contest: Abel is so clearly better than Zed that there's no room for reasonable disagreement. I don't just agree that we should offer the job to Abel; I strongly agree. The general point is that we believe the things we believe to varying degrees....