ask a question

recent responses

all topics

info

⚲

Ethics
Philosophy

It seems to me that much contemporary philosophy is a bit obsessed with clarifying arguments and analyzing statements and lacks real wisdom about the world. For example, I can imagine a typical situation where an ordinary person asks a professional philosopher a question relating to an applied ethics question. The philosopher answers by analysing the component parts of the statements contained within the question and attempting to assess the technicalities of the implicit argument put forward by the ordinary person. The outcome is that everybody is none the wiser as to the real answer to the applied ethics question because the philosopher has no real wisdom about the world but is merely trying to analyse argument structures! What do you think about this? Thanks

I'm not sure that the outcome of analysing arguments is always that no one is any wiser concerning the issue at stake. And that's because there are several possible results of such analysis, all of which would seem to help us better understand the issue at stake and the justifiability of possible answers: (1) Perhaps the (implicit or not) argument the person offers for her answer is invalid; in that case, the philosopher is able to show that, whether or not her answer is right, her argument doesn't give us reason to accept that answer as right. (2) Perhaps there are assumptions the person makes in offering her answer but that she doesn't defend; in that case, particularly if the assumptions seem questionable/controversial themselves, the philosopher is able to show that the answer requires more defense than the person has offered. Or (3), perhaps the way the person has framed the question closes off certain possible avenues of thinking about the issue; in that case, the philosopher is able to point out...
Philosophy

Can you give me a clear example of a problem that philosphers are generally acknowledged to have solved? Thanks.

I'm not sure whether this is "generally acknowledged" (or whether it counts as "solving a problem") but I think the following might be an example: In explaining human action, many people are quite tempted by what has come to be called 'psychological egoism': the view that each person has but one ultimate aim in acting, namely her own welfare (or self-interest). On this view, there is no such thing as genuinely altruistic action--action aiming ultimately at another's welfare--but only ever action that, at best, appears altruistic but is really ultimately self-interested. But in his Fifteen Sermons (1st ed., 1726), Joseph Butler (a philosopher and Anglican bishop) showed fairly decisively that this sort of view cannot be right. For more, see Part 1 of the the Stanford Encyclopedia article "Egoism": http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/egoism/
Justice

What have political philosophers said concerning the idea that money equals speech? It seems to me that money is a means of exchange and carries no inherent ideas or appeals, perhaps other than the metamessage that larger the sum the greater the purchaser's potential means and influence. A purchase is not persuasion. It seems to me that money allows (in the case of a televised political ad, for example) for a message to be developed, produced, distributed, etc. Money, then, facilitates speech, but is not itself speech. What arguments have I missed?

I doesn't seem to me that you've missed anything. The claim 'money equals speech' is best understood, I think, as a shorthand way of making the point you make here about money, that it "allows (in the case of a televised political ad, for example) for a message to be developed, produced, distributed, etc. Money, then, facilitates speech."
Law
Sex

If a man woke up next to a woman and could not remember having sexual intercourse with her we might surmise that he was so so drunk that he was not in a frame of mind to consent to sexual activity. Indeed, in a recent court ruling from a case I was researching, a judge determined that from the mere fact that the particular woman in the case did not remember having sex established a prima facie case that she was not conscious. While I think that court rulings such as that illustrate pervasive problematic beliefs that prevent men from getting fair treatment during rape trials I think that another question which ultimately ideologically underpins his disparate treatment in the hands of the legal system is simply not being asked. It's highly doubtful that the man in the situation I described could ever make a successful case that he was raped even in the rarest of circumstances or even if there was case to be made that she had a "guilty consciousness" because she lied to the police about whether or not she...

It seems to me that you are running together two very different claims about the effects of alcohol on persons' abilities to make decisions: (1) that alcohol can lead you to make choices that you would not have otherwise made (and so to consent to things you otherwise wouldn't have consented to); and (2) that alcohol can impair your ability to make genuine choices altogether (and so can make it that you are incapable of consent). The question of rape concerns whether or not the other person has consented to sex, not whether or not the other person will regret later consenting to sex. And so, a man is not "responsible for knowing when his sexual actions will lead to a regretful state of mind in a woman." He, like everyone else, is responsible for knowing that the recipient of his sexual advances has consented to them. I'm not sure that the "dangerously entrenched orthodoxy" you mention is actually as entrenched as you think. The view implicit here seems to me to be just as popular in our culture and so...
Ethics
Euthanasia

Some people believe that removing someone from life support is wrong and is "playing God" because it could most likely cause death. With that line of thinking, shouldn't life support be considered "playing God" since they are sustaining life (especially when there is almost no chance for recovery)?

I think you're right to wonder about the 'playing God' objection. First off, it's not always clear what the objection actually is. Sometimes, it seems to be the straightforward claim that only God may make decisions about life and death (and so about when to prolong life or hasten death); humans may not. But, if this is the claim, you're right to notice that, if it works against a decision to hasten death, it should also work against a decision to prolong (or sustain) life; and so, the objection ends up also undermining the position of the person making the objection. But I wonder if the objection is not sometimes a different sort of claim, one that doesn't suffer this sort of problem. The claim might be that only God may decide the time of a person's death, particularly when means are available to us humans to prolong or sustain that life. In other words, the claim might be that, so long as there are means available to prolong a person's life, we humans must decide to use those means to prolong that life...