I rather expect that monogamous marriage is more the result of the agricultural revolution than an artifact of our life spans. It was when we changed from hunter-gatherers to "property-owners" (so that we could raise our crops and lay claim to the fruits of our agricultural labors), I suspect, that someone got the brilliant idea that we could own not only land and what it produces, but also start building private homes (since farmers don't need to keep moving around to hunt and gather) and having private families. That was when we began to "own" other people--including slaves, spouses, and children. In many early versions, this "ownership" was strictly one-way: it was not adultery (or a violation of marriage) for a man to have sex with some woman who was not owned by someone else (either as wife or daughter, for example), but was a violation of marriage if the wife engaged in such extra-marital activity. The institution has changed as human society has changed, but I still think it is an...

Virtue ethics is not just interested in the characterological states of the agent , but also on those acted upon. So bad behavior does not just express bad character, it also has effects on those who are acted upon, and in the worst cases, it has the effect of damaging the characters of those who are victimized by the bad behavior. For example, part of what is wrong with treating me badly is that it is likely that I will become more defensive, less trusting, less friendly, than I waas before I was treated badly. These bad--but quite natural--reactions can become habitual if someone is victimized enough. And as the gravity of the offense becomes greater, it seems there is also greater potential for the victim to be greatly damaged in their own character--victims, in other words, can be made less virtuous themselves, as a result of being victimized. Indeed, in a virtue theory, this may be the very worst aspect of bad behavior.

Most philosophers are still very much interested in, and try to engage regularly in, live discussions with others. You won't find many of us claiming, for example, that teaching philosophy can effectively be done remotely, for example. The direct exchange of ideas and the interplay of active minds in an immediate person-to-person context still seems to most of us to be critical. On the other hand, writing and reading make ideas more available than does simply speaking. You don't have to have known Kant to read his works and be engaged with and influenced by his thought. Reading and writing are the skills of our globalized age, and it allows us to transcend time by "speaking" to those who we can never meet, because of distance in space or time. By reading my colleagues' work (before I meet them in person), I can get to know which of them I want to speak with in person. So as important as speaking, listening and such are, writing and reading offer distinct advantages that we would be very...

I think what may be tripping you up here is the vaguess of terms like "pleasure" and "enjoyment," which you seem to treat not only as equivalent, but also as univocal in their reference. There are lots and lots of different kinds of pleasures: sexual, gustatory, aesthetic, and so on. There are lots and lots of enjoyments: some are pleasures, and others have to do with doing things we like (even when they are not accompanied by pleasant sensation--think of playing tennis when your knee hurts, but you are in a really great game and playing well. So, one can have one kind of pleasure even when one is undergoing a different kind to pain. One can have one kind of enjoyment even when is undergoing another kind of suffering. A masochist (always measured by someone else's standard of what counts as a "healthy" or "wholesome" kind of enjoyment, mind you!) is thus one who has a certain kind of pleasure or enjoyment that is somehow linked to their also being in a certain (other) kind of pain or...

I fear you may take my answer to be flippant, but I assure you that it is not. My own practice is to open any door for anyone who might need the door opened. I open doors for people who are going to ride in my car; I open the door to my own office when I am about to go in and have a chat with a student; I open the door for people I have never met when I get to the door first. This plainly has nothing to dowith sexism, since I take the politness of such gestures to apply to any and all, regardless of gender or circumstance. So it looks to me that practicing this minor bit of politesse is your answer: just be polite and open doors for anyone whenever it is feasible (without making a scene, of course!) to do so.

First of all, it is nonsense to try to assess the probability of intelligent human life occurring unless we first stipulate what the prior conditions are. According to evolutionary theory, human beings and other living things are the result of genetic mutations that occur within prior life forms, which are then selected as a result of added fitness within a certain environment. Given the nature of this process, it is all but senseless to assess the (prior) probability that some specific life form would emerge from a (random) mutation in the prior life form, given all of the variables that are pertinent to fitness within a given environment. So if someone thinks they can calculate this as a real probability, I expect they are simply making up the values on which their calculations are based. This is no way to do things! Now, there may be calculations we can apply to very specific conditions at very specific places and times, with respect the the likelihood that some very specific string of...

I think the practice of "rating" different departments is tricky at best, and at worst sheer fraud. So my answer will be very indirect. Obviously, students want professors who are engaging and interesting to teach them. But from a distance, I think it can be very difficult to assess whether either of the places you are looking at would be preferable on this score. The only access the general public has to student responses to teaching is something like ratemyprofessors.com, which I would use only with the most extreme caution. For one thing, it provide samples from only the tiniest fraction of students who have taken the professor--and only those who liked or disliked the professor so much that they wanted to put ion the effort of a review. Moreover, their editorial standards are quite lax--in my own case, there appears a crank response from a supposed student who says he/she took a course from me that does not exist in our curriculum, and the likes of which I was not teaching the term...

Your question calls to mind Aristotle's so-called "four causes," which I prefer to think of as four sorts of explanation. "Material Cause": explaining a thing in terms of what it is made of (in the case of the Bic lighter, plastic, compressed gas, etc.) "Formal Cause": explaining a thing in terms of what it is (it's a Bic lighter!) "Efficient Cause": Explaining a thing in terms of how it came to be (this, I think, is our normal concept of cause--refer to the operations of the factory where the lighted was made) "Final Cause": Explaining a thing in virtue of what it characteristicallydoes or what purpose it may have. (Ignites cigarettes, cigars, or pipes for smokers to use.) In Aristotle's system, the Formal and Final Causes are linked, but not so tightly as in your more reduced conception: A thing can still be a Bic lighter, but no longer able to fulfill it's Final Cause, since these are distinct. So you might find Aristotle helpful here. If you want to see what he has...

Maybe you should read a little more Aristotle. Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics deals directly with this issue. So does the end of Book IV of Plato's Republic , from a somewhat different perspective. Plato also has Socrates talk about what it means to value "the most important things" in the Apology (see 22d-e, and then his famous statement about what makes life worth living at 38a). This same viewpoint may be echoed somewhat in the famous "intellectualism" of the last book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics . To make a very clumsy summary of Aristotle: human beings are, for him, rational animals. That means that what is good for us will include what is good for all animals (such as nutrition and so on) but must also include something of the life of the mind. He thinks that human flurishing will be realized in acting in accordance with a rational principle, which is to say acting virtuosly--by which he does not simply mean doing what the virtuous person does, but doing it ...

First a disclaimer--I don't speak for feminists in this response. But something in the question piqued me a bit, but then there is also something I wanted to pursue a bit. I think that talk about "men in general" and "women in general" is already likely to deal in the sorts of stereotypes that philosophers should try to avoid. I don't disagree that there are "behaviors and traits" worthy of criticism or blame, but the generality that these may be associated with "men in general" strikes me as prejudice--or at least a likely source of such. It is simply too easy to go from "men in general" to the presumption that the next man I might meet may be assumed to be guilty before I have any evidence of such guilt. This is how prejudice works. To pursue another line, however, I would recommend the work of feminist philosopher Claudia Card to the questioner. Much of Card's work has been focused on the nature and effects of victimization. It is to her (in modern times) that we owe the notion of the...