May I refer you to my answer to question 1114?

I fully agree with you that organs could save lives, very many lives each year, not to speak of health improvements. But nearly all of this problem can be solved rather easily by reversing the standard default. Instead of assuming that a person who dies without leaving specific instructions does not want his or her organs to be used, we should stipulate the opposite. We should institute easy and convenient ways for people to register their veto against the posthumous use of their organs. And we should then assume that all who have not registered such a veto are consenting to the posthumous use of their organs for saving the lives or restoring the health of other people. This simple change in the law would give us the needed organs without the problems I discuss in the response to Q1114.

Let me try to tackle a different aspect of your question: Why should we respect the wishes of someone who has died? This depends on how you view harm, and whether you think someone can be harmed after his or her death. One way of thinking about this question is to think about whether someone can be harmed even if that harm does not impinge on their experiences in any way. Think of Truman in the movie The Truman Show, and imagine that the producers of the show were just a little more skillfulat keeping the deception going, so that it really was completely seamless. Truman never knows that he is being deceived, and from his point of view, his life is just find and dandy. So is he harmed by the deception? If, like me, you have the intuition that he is -- even though he doesn't know about the deception at all and even though the deception has no negative impact (in fact, it has quite a positive impact) on his experience -- you have some inclination to accept that harms can exist outside of experience. And that opens the door to the claim that you can be harmed after your death. If that's the case, then we have an easy explanation for why we should respect your wishes: not doing so would harm you.

These reflections are by no means definitive, but I hope they help show some of the philosophical issues in the background of the question you raise. Many of the essays in The Metaphysics of Death (a great collection on death edited by J.M. Fischer) address these issues in a lot of detail.

The obvious place to start is with Descartes' *Meditations*. If you're short of time, you could read just the first two. Alongside you might find helpful ch. 4 of *Philosophy: The Basics* by Nigel Warburton. If you're then feeling a bit braver, you might try Tony Brueckner's article 'Brains in a Vat' in the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy -- there's a link to this from this website, on the right-hand side. Brueckner has more suggestions on reading. Good luck!

You seem to be raising a couple of puzzles here. One is how it has come about that human beings are sometimes motivated to help strangers, given that we might have expected evolution to produce beings concerned to promote the survival only of themselves and their kin. One immediate answer to this question is that, despite what some fanatical sociobiologists say, you can't explain everything about human behaviour as it is now merely by reference to our evolutionary history -- even if you allow in cultural as well as biological evolution. Evolution made it possible for impartial benevolence to develop, but it didn't necessitate it. Its emergence -- where it has emerged -- is to be understood primarily in terms of history rather than biology.

The second puzzle is why we *should* help others even when doing so doesn't benefit us. Many people have believed egoism -- the view that the only reason we have to do anything is grounded in the promotion of our own well-being. Philosophy has so far failed to provide a knock-down argument against egoism. But what it has clarified is some of its implications -- for example, that the fact that I can save you from years of agony by pushing some button gives me no reason to push that button.

There's an important difference between airing one's beliefs or preferences and merely possessing them. Many feel that criticizing people for beliefs is unfair, since beliefs aren't voluntary and one can be held responsible only for what's voluntary. But some philosophers doubt this (see e.g. Robert M. Adams's wonderful paper 'Involuntary Sins'). Imagine someone whose beliefs about homosexuality are unusually vicious -- perhaps they think gays should be tortured. Even if we think this person's beliefs are involuntary, we'll probably be tempted to criticize them. (It may be, of course, that this kind of criticism is of a different kind from that we use in the case of voluntary action.)

But this general didn't just hold these beliefs. He uttered them, and that is something that he could be held responsible for in the ordinary sense. Here I suspect people might want to criticize him from two angles. First, it might be thought that he was violating some principle of professional ethics. He was speaking as a member of the US army, and shouldn't have said anything that was against US army policy or might plausibly be seen as bringing the army into disrepute. Second, his comment raises questions about the limits of freedom of speech, most famously discussed in J.S. Mill's *On Liberty*. What one thinks about such limits is going to depend on one's general moral view. But something like Mill's view is quite common: that speech can be criticized if it is potentially harmful to others. Given that people often attack or discriminate against gays, speech that encourages such action should be criticized.

If we take 'intuition' to mean something like what just seems right or wrong, then philosophy often seems to rely on intuition. One kind of case is when we are trying to analyse a concept. Take the concept of knowledge. We convince ourselves that knowledge is not quite the same as justified true belief, since if you believe that it's 10:45 because your normally reliable watch says so, you don't know it's 10:45 if in fact your watch stopped exactly twelve hours ago, even though your belief is true and justified. But notice that here the argument relies on our intuition that in this case you don't know the time. That seems the right answer, and philosophers lean on that feeling. Another kind of example is a situation in ethics where you decide what is right by playing your intuitions off against each other. It seems right that one shouldn't cause unnecessary suffering, and yet it also seems OK to eat meat. Then you come to believe that eating meat causes unecessary suffering. So for the sake of coherence you have to give up one of your intuitions. In fact a lot of philosophy of like that: we sniff out incoherences in our intuitions and then think about the best way to make things coherent. That process may involve giving up some of our initial intiutions, but our intuitions are also carrying a lot of weight.

I just answered another question related to this one. Please see my answer to that one. In gist, (1) which animals did you have in mind--"animals" is too generic for me to get much traction on an ethical issue. And (2) why do you think it is more appropriate to run experiments on mentally challenged or disabled human beings? Are (some species of) animals somhow more deserving of our moral respect? Why? Are (some species of) animals more ethically important than (some) human beings? What makes you think that?

I can think of a great variety of what seem to me to be ethically significant issues that need to be visited here. One is the question of consent, which I discussed in my answer to the other question. Others include: ability to experience pain, cognitive capacities (such as memory, self-awareness), normal life-expectancy of the creature, normal "quality of life" expectancy of the creature (and how much experimentation would lead to deviation from such expectancies).

I tend to think that we do a great deal of projection of our own capacities onto other species, and I also tend to think that our doing so leads us to misjudge ethical issues and their degree of applicability to other species. I certainly do NOT think that it is OK to torture cats and dogs for kicks--but I do think that global judgments about what is and is not ethically appropriate involving animals is likely to be far more complex than the kind of simplicity your question assumes.

Perhaps it depends on how strongly you condemn it. Let's assume that, like many people, you think the invasion of Iraq was a crime under international law, as well as extremely harmful and dangerous. Seems to me that we might want to encourage a public morality according to which people who think this and don't speak out should be considered at least somewhat guilty by association compared with those who do.

Many reasons for action depend on the agent's preferences. For example, that a certain program starts at 9pm is a reason for you to head home only if you want to watch this program -- and the weight of this reason depends on the strength of your desire. That reading makes you wiser, or ice cream makes you happier, is a reason for you to read or to eat ice cream only if you want to be wiser or happier. All selfish reasons are of this kind.

The fact that a child will drown if you don't rescue her is (normally understood as) a reason for you to rescue the child and, more specifically, as a reason that applies to you, with a certain weight, regardless of your preferences. It is then (understood as) a moral reason for action.

We can refine this explication by distinguishing motivating and normative reasons. A reason that actually motivates some agent is a moral motivating reason just in case this agent takes that reason to apply to her, with a certain weight, regardless of her own preferences. Interestingly, such a moral motivating reason may actually be immoral, as when a person believes he ought never to help black people even if he'd want to do so.

A reason that applies to some agent is a moral reason just in case it applies to her, with a certain weight, regardless of her own preferences. If a person's need for help is a reason to help this person, whether one wants to or not, then it is a moral normative reason. This contrasts with non-moral normative reasons: That the stock of a certain company is overvalued is a reason for you to sell such stock. Yet the application and weight of this reason depends on your preference for being more rather than less affluent -- the ought here is not moral (unconditional), but rather prudential (conditional). Normative reasons may not be motivating: Agents may not recognize normative reasons (of either kind) that actually apply to them and may then fail to take them into account.

We can explicate moral relevance along the same lines: A decision-maker takes something to be morally relevant just in case she takes its relevance to be independent of her preferences (motivating reason). And something actually is morally relevant to some decision just in case its relevance is independent of the preferences of the decision-maker (normative reason).

Can something be both moral and selfish? That depends on what this something is. A reason for action cannot be both moral and selfish -- it either is or is not (taken to be) independent of the agent's preferences. Persons are typically mixtures -- more moral and less selfish or less moral and more selfish, depending on the extent to which they are motivated by reasons that are, or are not, independent of their own preferences. An action can be both moral and selfish -- when it is motivated by reasons of both kinds.