Bad taste, perhaps, but surely not unethical. In any case, the reality of the participants and their "problems" is often in question in any case. The shows do give us the opportunity to consider a number of interesting issues that can arise within human relationships, although chiefly for amusement than for anything else, and there is nothing wrong with that, except for the feeling of vague superiority that most viewers probably feel when comparing their own lives to the complicated disasters that those onthe shows seem to inhabit.

They completely agree on the point that they never completely agree on anything. Whether they should agree on this or on anything else is an interesting question. Historians often disagree on what actually happened, and given that there are no facts in philosophy, the scope for disagreement is of course extended. Even when they agree philosophers usually agree for different reasons, which makes the agreement rather tenuous, at best. On the other hand, there is little more tedious than a bunch of philosophers who agree with each other, so perhaps we should rejoice in disagreement.

I think you are right, we cannot be forced to love someone and so cannot be blamed for not doing so. On the other hand, love is not necessarily a sudden emotion but can be acquired over time and both strengthen and weaken. So one might be justly blamed for not having taken the necessary steps to develop the appropriate emotion for someone, especially a child or spouse. There are some children who cannot be loved even (or especially) by their parents, but those children would at least have the right to demand that the parents try!

No, because dirty fingernails, as you would readily acknowledge if you saw mine, are not a perfection, and so cannot be attributed to God. The point of perfection is that not everything can be a perfection. Even though I may have perfectly dirty fingernails, the most dirty fingernails ever seen in human existence, that would still not make me divine nor even divine-like, alas.

Whatever meaning life may have, it does not vary depending on where one lives. There is the saying, I've been rich and I've been poor, and rich is better, and no doubt that is true, but wherever we live or however wealthy our environment, the basic issues of life and death do not vary. It is also worth remembering that many people in the West are very poor, and come from communities which have persisted in poverty for generations. Changing the world is no big deal, and really does nothing to increase one's enjoyment of living, nor of life itself.

I think you are right, I always thought it was strange for someone to claim to be proud of something one did nothing to achieve. One could be pleased, certainly, to discover that one was a member of the master race, but proud, no. Unless of course it was something one managed to achieve through talent and/or effort but then race is not an objective in that sense. I suppose though that many Americans could be proud to be American if they were something else initially and then acquired US citizenship. But then nationality is not equivalent to race, fortunately, in most countries.

I rather think it is and I wonder why we allow it to be performed, except in those cases where there is a medical need for it. There are many countries already where female circumcision is illegal, although sadly also plenty of countries where it is widespread as a custom. To alter the physical structure of a child who cannot give consent and for no good physical reason seems indefensible.

Some people take the line that any woman who wears this outfit is irretrievably caught up in a submissive relationship with men, and so the costume should be banned, or at least discouraged. Any woman who says she really wants to wear it is suffering from false consciousness, and the same policy applies. But the evidence is that many woman want to wear it, and say they feel liberated by wearing it, and say with some plausibility that it is the women who are wearing clothes which they think are alluring to men who are in a submissive relationship, not them. I often disapprove of the clothes people wear. On cold days young women often wear very few clothes since they wish to display their bodies. They have on their feet shoes which look dangerous, even if they are not. There is now an enthusiasm for tattoos, and I am sure they are often dangerous and certainly painful things to have applied to the skin. I remember in the past having a discussion in class about Muslim clothes and the class all highly...

Certainly, it was thought for a long time by a wide range of thinkers that life after death exists, even by thinkers without traditional religious views. The basic distinction on this issue is not religious vs. areligious, but materialists vs. the rest. Materialists who see us as essentially material beings can find little to be said in favour of the idea that once the matter disappears or disintegrates, something else survives. The main argument for life after death by those who are not wedded in their philosophy to a particular religion is often a form of Aristotelianism as developed by the Neoplatonists, that the thinking part of us is aligned with the abstract and eternal, and so while our physical side is malleable, our intellect is capable of carrying on, albeit not in the sense that we as individuals carry on. It is here that the absence of a link with religion becomes significant, since whatever survives cannot really be punished or rewarded and so the traditional accounts of an afterlife...

Exactly what it is in other periods, there are no right or wrong times to produce or consume art. In fact, there is some evidence that the tougher the times, the better the art.