When a women dresses "slutty" and is raped people are usually divided between two camps. The blame can either be placed solely on the perpetrators or some would argue that the women is also to blame for getting into the situation. While admittedly I fall into the second camp, I don't quite understand why a victim can't be at least partially to blame for his/her situation. Can't people be blamed for creating a situation in which a crime is more likely or will happen? If I supply terrorists with nuclear weapons, and millions die. Yet I didn't kill anyone and the terrorists who did had a choice to disarm the weapon. Yet most people would agree that I would be sharing the blame. If I encourage racism by wearing a "hate blacks" T shirt and speaking in white supremacist rallies do I share any of the blame for the mistreatment of minorities? (Equally am I to blame if I am attacked by black gangs?) Ultimately if a women dresses "slutty" and is raped, can't she be blamed for encouraging the situation? I'm...

We should distinguish the questions (i) whether someone contributes to a bad event and (ii) whether she is blameworthy on account of this contribution (that is, shares blame for the bad event). In your two analogies (supplying nuclear weapons to terrorists and wearing a "hate blacks" T-shirt) the agent contributes causally and also is blameworthy. (Note that any blame we assign to an enabler or encourager or any other kind of causal contributor need not diminish in any way the blameworthiness of the perpetrator.) But in many other cases, the two questions have different answers. Here's an example: someone threatens credibly that s/he will burn down your house unless you marry her/him; you turn down this person, and s/he does burn down your house. Here your refusal of the marriage proposal was a crucial causal contributor to the bad event, but you are not to blame. You're not morally required to marry someone to keep her/him from burning down a house. Similarly with the way women dress. Even if the...

The book "Philosophy through Video Games" contains an interesting discussion about the nature of personal identity, in relation to the claims video game players make about "themselves" and what "they" did while "in" a game. I wanted to ask the philosophers here what you make of a player's claim that, for example, "I shot two robbers yesterday in a video game." The player, as a human being, clearly did not shoot any other human beings or animals yesterday (one should hope), yet at the same time, saying the sentence is false seems like a gross oversimplification. Is a person's video game avatar an extension of their identity, and thus what happens to the avatar also (in a sense) happens to them? Or does the sentence use niche meanings of words rather than their normal meanings?

Before we make things complicated, let's try whether a simple approach might work. We can say that the "I" refers unproblematically to the agent as a human being and that the somewhat special meanings are those of "shoot" and "robber". These words have special meanings within the game just as "threatening your knight" has a special meaning in chess. To be sure, there's the difference that in video games -- unlike chess -- the player is "embodied" as some sort of virtual personality. So you can move "your" fist or cloak "your" body or lose "your" left arm. But how is this different from moving "your" rook and protecting "your" king or losing "your" queen in chess? More interesting in your sense may be video games in which one creates a coherent personality. Perhaps you play a little girl and I play her grandmother. This is like collaborative fiction writing or improvization theater. In the end -- as with all good fiction -- one can debate about the psychology and motivations of such characters as...

What is the meaning of loyalty? If I work in an organization and am committed to its purpose but feel that the organization is not meeting its purpose or is perhaps subverting it, to what do I owe my loyalty? To those currently in the organization or to what I understand to be the purpose of the organization?

I don't think the dilemma you sketch is really about the meaning of loyalty. You might be loyal to the organization's purpose (as you understand it) or you might be loyal to your current fellow members. The question really is which more deserves your loyalty. There is no general answer, but here are a few reflections that you may find helpful. One important factor is whether the purpose of the organization has independent importance. Suppose the organization is the Silly Hat Society. It's purpose is for members to come together for fun monthly meetings wearing silly hats. Over the years, the hat part recedes into the background, many show up with uncreative headgear and some even without anything -- but members still enjoy one another's company and are having a good time. In this case, it would be a little silly to place loyalty to the organization's purpose above loyalty to its members: silly to berate members to live up to the purpose of the organization and so on. Here it does not really matter...

I am a student working on getting a degree in Philosophy, and my goal is to get my Master's in Philosophy and a PhD as well. There's only one problem I think. I am 40 years old! I have worked at a job I hated for 13 years, and finally decided to persue my dream. My question is, I have I waited to late in life to persue my dream of teaching Philosophy? I love everything I learn and read, and consistantly get A's in all my Philosophy classes, but am I going to be to old to do what I have dreamed of? Thanks for your opinion!

Much depends on the country you're in. You have better prospects in the US, I think, than elsewhere because the US has no mandatory retirement age, holds people responsible for their own retirement savings, and has rules against age discrimination. (In many other countries, when a university hires someone at 45, it gets burdened with the obligation to pay her/him a pension after age 65 or so.) I think that, if you go on the job market at 45 or so with a really good dissertation and perhaps two published articles, you stand a fair chance of landing a job, especially if you also have a track record as a good teacher or teaching assistant. At least your prospects won't be substantially inferior to those of younger, equally qualified candidates.

Why are most nations opposed to prison labor? From a justice perspective, it seems that would far better repay the damage caused by whatever crimes they committed than sitting around in a prison all day. From a rehabilitation perspective, it would seem that having prisoners (who are often from poor backgrounds) learn or practice a trade of some kind, or engage in unskilled labor, might help facilitate reintegration after release. Yet I've met lots of people who equate prison labor with slavery.

I'm not sure most nations really are opposed to prison labor -- it's pretty common in most of the countries I know something about. The reason against is close to what you suggest: if the labor is mandatory, then it does seem close to slavery; and if the labor is enticed e.g. through an attractive wage, then it seems that prisoners are getting too good a deal and are not really repaying society for the damage caused by their crime. Perhaps a reasonable compromise is to make the labor voluntary and to pay for it with a low salary and/or with some special perks (such as extra time in the library or exercise room, better food, additional visits, etc.).

I'm a rising senior economics major, and I'm trying to make a decision about my career. I want to do as much good as possible, but I'm not sure how to estimate how much good I would produce in different careers. I've researched the evidence-based approaches that some philanthropic foundations use (e.g., the "impact planning" of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), but their formulas, etc. don't seem generalizable to calculating an individual's marginal impact. For example, maybe it makes sense to donate a lot to global health but not pursue a career in it because there are already so many working in development. Right now I'm assuming that anything really important will eventually be achieved, so any contribution I make will consist of just coming up with an idea/implementing a project sooner than it would have otherwise. So how about this formula: (N * T / L) * Q Where N is the number of people in the population I'm targeting, T is how much sooner I come up with an idea/implement (e.g., a year sooner...

There are some technical issues with your formula. You need to decide whether you want to understand L as a constant (80 years), thus assigning equal value to each year of human life, or whether you want to understand L as a variable that varies from person to person, thus assigning greater value to life years of persons whose lives are short. There are plausible arguments on both sides. You might also rethink your reliance on percentage increase in the goodness of a person's life/time. Do you conceive of goodness as being always a positive number? And do you assume there to be some upper bound such that goodness can vary, say, between zero and one? Assuming all this, your formula is prioritarian: you give greater weight to those who are worse off. Thus, according to your formula, getting someone from 0.01 to o.11 is 50 times more valuable than getting someone else from 0.5 to 0.6 (+1000 percent versus +20 percent). Prioritarians often use a different formula, measuring down from the top or from...

Animal welfare regulations require that pain killers be administered to experimental animals subjected to painful experimental procedures even if the animal is subsequently killed. From the point of the animal, is there any utility in this requirement? Assume that there is no utility if the animal is killed immediately after the pain since it will no longer have a memory of the pain when it is dead. Then, it would seem the regulations are misguided (if their intent is only to protect the animal) and it would be ethical to not administer a pain killer. With this assumption, is there some interval in which it would become unethical? If it is concluded that it is impossible to define an interval since for every interval the animal would no longer have a memory of the pain at the end of the interval when it is dead. If this is the case, then would it always be ethically acceptable not to administer pain killers, since all animals will die eventually.

You seem to be assuming that the only bad thing about pain is that it will be remembered. But is this right? I think not. One way to argue against the assumption is by analogy: if the assumption were correct, then presumably the only bad thing about memories of pain would be that they will be remembered. And so on up. So long as all sentient beings die eventually, there would then be nothing bad (or good?) about their experiences because all memory of them would eventually disappear. Rejecting what you assume, we would say that pain itself is also distressing and therefore bad. In fact, without that distress of pain itself it's hard to understand why memories of pain should be distressing. If pain itself is distressing and bad, then it makes sense to avoid and alleviate pain. And this is in fact what we routinely do when we offer palliative care to a patient who would otherwise die in great pain. The case of the animals you describe is essentially similar. Just as it is less bad if the...

Is it moral for me as a transexual to expect others to treat me as female? Is this a basic right of self-identification or am I inappropriately impinging my will on others?

You mean the word "expect" in a normative sense, I take it. You are asking others to accept and respect your self-identification and suggesting to them that they ought to accept and respect it. So you are asking for more than a basic right of self-identification. Still, I think what you ask is reasonable and something we others ought to accept and respect much as we ought to accept and respect another person's (newly changed or old) religious identification, sexual preference or choice of lifestyle when such choices do not harm us or third parties. Obviously, a choice like yours may be hard for some persons to accept -- a wife may find it hard to accept that the man she loved and married now asks to be treated as a female. But leaving a narrow class of such exceptions aside, I don't think you are asking too much. Many may find it difficult to express their acceptance and respect in an easy and natural way as any explicit expression may strike them as awkward for themselves and also for you....

In his answer to question 2275 (from Sep 7th 2008), Thomas Pogge wrote: “Most political leaders do not act well, morally, and in most cases this is because they are not moral persons, not serious about morality. To be serious about morality, one must try to integrate one’s considered moral judgments through more general moral principles into a coherent account of morally acceptable conduct; one must work out what this unified system of beliefs and commitments implies for one’s own life; and one must make a serious effort to honour these implications in one’s own conduct and judgments. Those who are not serious about morality typically do not act well, morally...” I am very interested in the notion of ‘moral seriousness’, and would be interested to know what the other panelists think about the nature of ‘being morally serious’, as opposed to that of merely ‘being moral’ – and whether they agree with Prof Pogge’s account. I would also be grateful if you – Prof Pogge – could elaborate on your previous...

Moral judgments are often distorted by self-interest. A morally serious person must try to combat this danger by thinking beyond the particular case. A very simple way of doing this is to contemplate analogous situations in which roles are reversed (the Golden Rule). By extending one's judgments to a larger set of cases and then aiming for a coherent way of judging these cases, one is beginning to do what I was asking. Philosophers may take this sort of exercise quite far and, as you surmise, I don't think that every morally serious person needs to do this. But a morally serious person will question her or his moral judgments in the ways I sketched, especially when they are "convenient", that is, in accordance with her/his own self-interest.

I read a few responses to questions about suicide, and something struck me as odd about a few of the replies. One consistent factor responders have noted as a weighing against suicide is that the death of a suicide victim will very likely have devastating consequences on friends and family members. But, if we granted that potential suicide victims truly were suffering and were correct in judging that their circumstances were unlikely to improve, wouldn't we essentially be asking them to suffer for the sake of others? Wouldn't this be very similar to the situation where we ask if torturing one person would be justifiable if it could improve the lives of others, something which people tend to consistently give a negative response to? I can't see that anyone has a positive duty to suffer for the sake of others' happiness.

One important difference to torture is that the question here is whether the agent should impose a certain pain on her-/himself for the sake of others -- not whether the agent may or should impose pain on third parties. To illustrate the relevance of this point: it makes good sense for me to believe both (a) that a person with my sort of income ought to give at least 10 percent of it toward effective poverty relief and (b) that it would be wrong for me (or anyone) to force other people with similar salaries to do so. The analogue to torture would be forcing the potential suicidee to stay alive against her/his will -- and this was not what I was advocating. Now, do you have a duty to suffer for the sake of others' happiness? I think the answer depends on what is at stake for the others and what is at stake for you. Peter Singer has made a very convincing case for holding that you have a duty to rescue a drowning child from a shallow pond. Here what is at stake is the very survival of the child...

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