In both the legal and the familiar sense of the word "murderer," the answer is no. You certainly wouldn't be charged with murder in a case like this, and if you were, successfully arguing that you didn't actually kill the person but merely allowed them to die would lead to a "not guilty" verdict. Murder, as it's usually understood, is unlawful killing or, in the non-legal sense, morally unjustified killing . That said, someone might argue that if you're in a position to save someone's life and you don't, then you're guilty of something just as bad as murder. No doubt we can come up with hypothetical cases where this might be so. For instance: Alex intends to kill Bob; he's got the means and the will. But on his way to do the deed, he discovers Bob unconscious and bleeding by the side of the road. Suppose it's clear that Alex could save him; calling 911 and staunching his wound until help arrives would do. But Alex does nothing except wait for Bob to breathe his last. In this case, we might say...

I don't know how much older you are than the women you watch with, and I don't know anything about the larger situation. I don't know why you aren't picking companions closer to your own age, and I don't know anything about the young women and your relationship with them. What I'd think in detail would depend on all that. But generalizations about "society" are typically pretty vapid. Does "society" mean "most people?" How do you know? Do you have any real evidence as opposed to impressions, anecdotes and a look at website comments by high-schoolers? And most important, what does this have to do with whether you should be doing what you're doing ? We can agree that the high-schoolers should have kept their comments to themselves. We can also agree, at least for argument's sake, that a 19-year-old could make a clear-eyed, responsible decision to make a porn. But that's not the issue. The issue is how you should be dealing with the particular young women you're talking about, in the particular...

Phrases like "child abuse" are most useful if they pack some punch. When we think of child abuse, what comes to mind are such things as deliberate acts of cruelty, gross neglect, causing serious bodily harm, and sexual molestation. All of those are clear cases of child abuse. Whether a child ends up obese, however, is a complicated matter. Two children might eat the same diet, and yet one might end up obese and the other not. Parents may have some control over their children's weight, but the decision that one's child will not become obese might not be easy to act on, and acting on it might have its own unfortunate side effects. This isn't to suggest that childhood obesity is trivial. But obesity is complicated. If it could be easily prevented, and if the way to prevent it was widely understood, then we might say that clear cases of "allowing" one's child to become obese count as a kind of child abuse. As it is, things aren't nearly so straightforward.

Before your relative piped up, you were giving money to the homeless because you thought it was a good thing to do. Now you're worried that your motives aren't so pure. and you've asked whether you should stop giving because expecting a reward is "defeating the purpose of the generosity." I thought the purpose of the generosity was to help the homeless. Furthermore, that purpose will still be served even if your personal motives are now mixed. If there was a good reason to give money to the homeless before, that reason hasn't gone away because of this change in your psychology. We should add that your relative's observation doesn't show much of anything. Most of us get at least some benefits or another pretty routinely. The fact that a benefit of some sort comes along sometime after you do your good deed doesn't give you any reason to think the good luck was a result of your good deed. But even if it was, the fact that you now have a self-interested reason to give money doesn't give you a...

It's an interesting question. One way to put it: are we obliged to put all our charitable resources where they will do the most good? Or can we donate to causes that are intrinsically worthy, even though we'd get more bang for the buck by giving everything something else? I'm reluctant to say that utilitarianism requires putting all our resources into the "biggest bang basket," though even if it does, there are some considerable imponderables here. We may save more lives directly if we put all our resources into rehydration kits. But there may be indirect benefits from other kinds of giving. For example: even though we may save more people initially by spending on rehydration kits, if we give no money to medical research, the long-term consequences might end up being worse than if we'd spread our charitable resources around. The utilitarian calculation, in other words, isn't as clear as it might seem. Also, whether "fairness" is quite the right term, there's something unsettling in the prospect...

Singling out rape allegations for special skepticism would be problematic to say the least. As far as I know, there's no reason at all to believe that allegations of rape are less likely to be true than allegations of other sorts of criminal behavior. But in any case, skepticism and the presumption of innocence are two different concepts. The presumption of innocence is a legal principle about the burden of proof in criminal cases, and it has nothing to do with how likely it is in general that people accused of certain sorts of crimes are guilty. In the American legal system, before someone can be convicted, the state must provide specific evidence (not generalities about the kind of crime at issue) that establishes guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt." This means that even if a defendant is probably guilty, the probability might still not be high enough to meet the standard for conviction. A jury member might believe it's more likely than not that the defendant committed the crime and yet might not vote...

A familiar old question! If the only reason I behave well is that I'm afraid I'll be punished if I don't or rewarded if I do, then my motives aren't moral motives at all. The fact that an all-powerful being commanded me to do something might give me a self-serving reason to do it, but by itself, it wouldn't provide a moral reason. That we can be moral without religion is clear from the fact that so many non-believers have deep moral commitments. Of course, that leaves open the possibility that they're somehow confused, but the crucial point is this: if there's no basis for morality without God, then adding God to the story doesn't change things. As for what the basis might be, there's a lot that could be said. But to take just one sort of consideration: I know that I don't like it when people treat me in hurtful ways. I also know that there's nothing special about me in this respect; my pain doesn't obviously count for any more than anyone else's. And I don't just know this intellectually; I...

A confession: I've never read more than a few words of Schopenhauer. However, as I hope will be clear, that doesn't really matter for the question you've asked. Whether or not reading Schopenhauer can cure sex addiction is something we could only find out by experimental means, and philosophers—even those intimately acquainted with Schopenhauer's writings—have no special insight into how the experiments would turn out. But let's suppose reading Schopenhauer really had this benefit. I take your question to be whether normative ethics should strive to have a therapeutic effect on the reader, helping him or her overcome vices and moral defects. I'd suggest that even though this might be a fortunate side-effect, it wouldn't be a criticism of the enterprise if things didn't work this way. What's needed to change people's dispositions and motivations might be quite different from getting clear on the question of how they ought to behave and what those dispositions and motivations ought to be. Normative...

Perhaps it depends on what sort of application you have in mind. Suppose we want to understand the sorts of conflicts you've singled out. Surely the attempt to understand isn't immoral—quite the opposite given what's at stake. And suppose that the branch of mathematics known as game theory helps us come to that understanding. It's hard to see what the objection could be. On the other hand, if a country has unjustly gone to war against another country and uses game theory to come up with strategies for winning, then we might want to say that this is an immoral use of game theory. However, the immorality here has nothing special to do with game theory. What's wrong is the waging of the war in the first place.

An interesting question. I think the answer is yes: there's a way to offer the sort of criticism you have in mind. It would be to argue that by Catholicism's own lights , the reasons for excluding women from the priesthood aren't satisfactory. Catholicism isn't just a closed system with no canons of evidence and argument. Indeed, Catholicism presents theological arguments for its view that only men can be priests, and those arguments are open to examination and scrutiny. Another way to put it: not all Catholics agree that women should be excluded from the priesthood. They think that the internal arguments for a male-only priesthood are weak. Whether they're right or wrong about this, their view isn't incoherent. Of course, this is just an example of a larger point. It's often possible to criticize a view whose larger presuppositions one rejects by pointing out that the view doesn't do well by its own standards. In the example at hand, there are things one would want to take into account...