Yes, it's doomed. And, moreover, in many ways it's pernicious. It's pernicious because it biases the direction of social policy and even personal conduct in the direction of things measurable in monetary terms and thereby arguably misallocates resources.

For example, consider one of the most prominent monetary measures of national wealth--GDP. The growth of GDP is typically taken to be a good thing. But really the best course of action would be to maximize the things that truly matter while minimizing GDP. GDP (or GNP if you like) measures the monetary cost of producing goods and services. But suppose you could produce the same goods and services while reducing GDP. Or, more importantly, suppose you could reduce GDP but actually increase things like happiness, life spans, general health, peaceableness, ecological well-being, biological diversity, educational attainment, artistic achievement, scientific advancement, moral virtue, athleticism, family stability, etc. The very fact that this is a conceptual possibility demonstrates that monetary measures are inadequate to define wealth.

How does anyone (not just philosophers or other academics) justify a choice of profession? One does what one is good at and what one likes to do.

Academics in particular (philosophers included) need not apologize for their choice; we are, after all, teachers (in addition to being [perhaps] ivory-towerish scholars or researchers), and teachers surely serve the greater good. We philosophers, in particular, encourage critical (and skeptical) thinking, which--I suggest--is a Good Thing even if what we critique might be whether or not material objects are mereological sums of simples (or something equally esoteric).

Some of us do try to help solve practical problems (and Karl Marx once observed that philosophers have only tried to understand the world but that the point is to change it--I would imagine those are fighting words to some, inspiring to others!). Yes, my analysis of Wittgenstein or, more obscurely, Meinong might not directly improve people's lives, but then again how would we prove that? Maybe my analysis of Meinong in a course might inspire some student to further study of philosophy and that might lead in turn to her studying artificial intelligence (yes, there is a link!--see some of my own publications :-), which might lead to some breakthrough in applications of AI to medicine.

I'm too tired to answer this directly. But if I had nothing else to say, I'd insist that art---painting, sculpture, music---has as little "direct" contribution to make as does philosophy, and I'm quite convinced of the importance of art to human flourishing. So perhaps the answer should be, "Man does not live by bread alone". Which is not, of course, to say that bread isn't important.

I love your question, but sadly I think it has a pretty easy answer. No, there's not a best way to do everything. Take your own example. The best way to brush your hair depends on what your hair-goals are. You might want shiny, smooth hair, or you might want the tousled bedhead look. If you want smooth hair, you must brush a lot. If you want the tousled look, you have to lay off the brush. There's nothing that says you must have either goal.

Of course, not every way is equally good. No matter what your hair-goals are, brushing with a rake is a bad idea. This gives people who like to supervise a little room to maneuver. You can tell other people they're doing things the wrong way, even though there isn't also, necessarily, a best.

I suspect Oliver Leaman has to be teasing. Good wine is -- of course -- a lot more expensive than soda pop because it is a very great deal finer (and that takes effort to produce!), not finer because it is more expensive.

The long cultivation of vines over many seasons at a good estate in the Chianti or Bordeaux, the careful harvesting, the long stages of production from vats to barriques to bottles, the cellaring, ... all that is not a cheap business, so of course decent wines are necessarily more expensive than industrially produced soda gunk. But we happily pay the price for the result of the loving labour of good producers as the wines are indeed one of the great achievements of human civilization.

We appreciate good wine for the elusive complexity we find in the aromas released in the glass, the intricately structured tastes, the very feel in the mouth, the lingering aftertastes. We delight in the delicious intoxication that it brings. As we experience more good wine, we learn to appreciate and distinguish more -- to find more in the wine. We learn how to marry appropriately good wine with good food, so each enhances and supports the experience of the other. And just as good food demands to be shared with friends and family, good wine asks to be drunk in company so the private sensual experience of relishing the wine itself becomes a shared human delight. That delight adds to the weave of human life linked to a long history and culture of wine-making and wine-drinking.

Wine is a proper object of aesthetic evaluation, as when we praise a wine for being balanced, elegant, well-structured, or criticize a wine for being crude, vulgarly brash, uninterestingly bland. Wine may not be an art object, but it is an aesthetic object -- something that repays our attention: here is an inexhaustibly complex aesthetic world to explore. Of course, the experience of tasting wine is essentially ephemeral -- but then so are many other of the great joys of life, whether it's listening to music or the more intimate fleeting sensual pleasures. Being ephemeral doesn't entail being trivial, or unimportant, or lacking value. Human things are empheral.

To be sure, just as there are some who are tone deaf or who can't relate to more than the most mindless pop music, there are some who are similarly unable to "get" good wine (indeed I believe that there is evidence than a significant proportion of people just can't "taste the difference"). But they are equally sad deprivations, being closed off from what are indeed two of the finest things of life, good music and good wine.

So I think I'll just go and open a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino, and listen again to the Goldberg Variations ...

There is a reason. They are more expensive.

Maimonides pointed out that civilized people value much more highly things that are literally useless or superfluous to our wellbeing, as compared with things that are vital. So bread and water are regarded as boring, and are relatively cheap, while more exotic and unnecessary products are valuable and cost a lot. He took this to be one of the features of civilization that are regrettable, and surely he is right.

I have long been fascinated by the desert saints, the extreme ascetics of the 4th century. The biggest "star" among them was Simeon Stylites, who stood alone on a pillar for 30 years, ceaselessly bowing in prayer, and enduring every conceivable deprivation. This struck me as the ultimate in solitary (and miserable) living until I started to wonder how we know so much about him. Then I learned that pilgrims used to throng to Egypt and Syria, where these ascetics lived, seeking inspiration and healing, or just for the spectacle. There's a wonderful bas relief from the year 500 showing a pilgrim on his way up a ladder leaning against Simeon's pillar. So these ascetics were not so completely alone after all. In fact, they were on the receiving end of a great deal of love. Maybe they loved these supplicants back, but clearly they did love their god.

I think in the lives of many people who live a monastic life there are hidden sources of love and affiliation. But then, surely to varying degrees, which isn't surprising. People do vary a lot in their need for human contact. It seems closed-minded to say that everyone needs the same level of connection to others to be fulfilled.

Well, if THE objective in life really is to make money without too much effort, then indeed there isn't much use for philosophical inquiries -- there are better ways of earning money than by being a philosopher.

But is earning a living in the best way really the (one and only) objective in life? I think most people would say that there are other important objectives as well: love, religion, friendship, music, sports, and so on -- but of course people have different views about what matters and how much. So here philosophy comes in, helping us to think clearly and wisely about what matters in life. Perhaps earning an easy living is really the best way to live. But wouldn't you want to think about this, and the alternatives, a bit before you commit yourself to such a life?

Although I can imagine cases where comparing the value of lives might be the way to go, it's not obvious that this is one of them. Heading down a path where we value lives by discounting on the basis of the likely number of remaining years (which is all I see at work here) seems a very dubious idea, fraught with all sorts of moral peril. Although there is something particularly poignant about the death of a child, this doesn't simply translate into a case for saying that the best solution to the dilemma you pose is to give the child's life a weight greater than that of the five adults who would otherwise die.

All this said, there are some hard issues in the general neighborhood. Deciding how to use resources in end-of-life situations, for example, is a serious problem where some sort of discounting doesn't simply seem out of place. But the issues here are tricky, and it's hard to see how any simple rule will work.

The best piece of advice I ever heard on this issue came in a talk I heard years ago about Darwin. Darwin wanted to convince us of something that wasn't at all obvious when he introduced it. But more to the point, he wanted to be taken seriously by the scientific community. How did he do it?

By spending the early part of his career demonstrating that he could do what his fellow scientists did -- that he could do credible, solid research that his colleagues would recognize as such. That made it possible for him to be taken seriously when he introduced his novel ideas. If someone is going to invest the time and energy needed to explore and evaluate ideas that are far from the mainstream, they need good reason to think that the effort might pay off. For every brilliant maverick in any field, there are at least 10 cranks.

We might put it this way: if you want to persuade your peers, you need to be accepted by them as an able worker in your field. And doing that has an advantage from your own intellectual point of view. If you want to pursue the 'truth,' you need to make sure that you aren't trapped inside the particularly small echo chamber of your own notions. It may well be that you see things your colleagues don't. But it may also be that your colleagues see things that you don't. So the best advice would seem to be: don't treat your situation as an either/or. There is room for a certain amount of both/and.