Versions of this Golden Rule appear in various cultures, and modern philosophical scrutiny can easily make fun of this Rule. Thus Kant asks what the judge should do with a defendant guilty of murder -- she wouldn't like to be jailed for many years, so she should presumably let him go. Amusing counterexamples could be multiplied endlessly: is the mother obligated to suck the breast of her infant son? Is the greedy adolescent obligated to write a will in favor of his rich aunt? And is one really obligated to bestow upon others all the myriad kindnesses that one would like others to bestow upon oneself? Much has been written about the Golden Rule -- also about it's "negative" version that you should not treat others as you would not want them to treat you -- in an effort to find an interpretation that is plausible. It is probably not possible to find a formulation that is plausible across the board and still a credible interpretation of the Rule you cite. Even if the Golden Rule is not workable as...

The existing situation is bad in at least two ways. First, your lover is deceiving her husband and the father of her child who is, as you put it, a reasonable man. He deserves better. If his wife does not love him, he should know this and have a chance to plan the rest of his life in light of this knowledge. Second, your affair is likely to come to light at some point, and this might have much worse consequences for all involved, including the child, than a frank confession. I see two potential ways out of the problematic situation. First, you can agree to end the affair. You can still write each other, see each other occasionally, perhaps, but you should then try to meet the husband and make quite sure that there is no return to a romantic relationship. If this is unworkable, this first option would call for a complete end of the relationship. Second, you could agree to marry each other after a divorce. You write that this was not workable earlier "because of the social issues". I don't know...

Your rent-free lifestyle does not wrong your parents who can easily afford you and are apparently willing to do so. And there's also nothing wrong with refusing to live like everyone else does -- some of the most admirable people in human history did just that. If everyone in this world were as well-off as you are, then there would be nothing immoral about your way of life. It would merely be lackluster, irrelevant, and boring for everyone but yourself. Pretty much everything worthwhile and interesting in this world is there thanks to human beings living with more than your level of ambition. But then not everyone in this world is as well-off as you are. And in this case, I think, your lifestyle does qualify as immoral. There are lots of people in this country and even more so abroad who are vastly worse off than you are, and you have a moral responsibility to do your share to fight these deprivations -- as many others are doing, through volunteer work, donations, and so on. If you had a job,...

From the description you give, it does not sound to me like your husband is, or ever was, in love with you. You might at least consider the possibility that his insistence on marriage -- "he could not be my friend without marring me because he was in love with me" -- was driven more by his immigration issues than by any combination of love and religion. Should this be the case, then you have no substantial obligation to stay. You are under no obligation to marry someone to help him get a desired citizenship. Nor do you have strong moral reason to stick to a commitment you once made to him if in making it you relied upon deceptive or misleading statements by him. Even if he is, in some sparkless way, in love with you, you are not in love with him. You should have a real chance to be an A student again, to fall in love, to have a bright life with sparks. What you are missing seems rather more substantial than the benefit he derives from your sacrifice. Moreover, by deciding against giving even more...

I disagree with Oliver's response to this question. In my view, "letting happen" is best understood as remaining passive when one might instead be averting harm from others by helping or protecting them. The failure to save a drowning swimmer would be an example, as would be the failure to prevent a child from running into a busy road. But the case you described is not one in which the agent remains passive. He actively escapes the camp and then the country, thereby knowingly triggering the events that lead to the deaths of his immediate family. Had he remained passive, his family would not have been killed. It is normally wrong to act in a way that one knows will lead to the deaths of innocent people -- even if one does not intend these deaths. It is wrong, for instance, to buy up a lot of corn in poor countries for ethanol fuel production when one can easily foresee that this will lead to many starvation deaths among the poor due to higher food prices. In the case you describe, two special...

Why should there be any incompatibility between dignity being both a goal and a justification? On the face of it, there seems to be harmony: if A is a worthwhile goal and B serves this goal, then B can be justified by appeal to A. Example: the goal of having a good job is served by having a good education and so obtaining a good education is justified by the contribution this education makes to winning a good job. Similarly in your case: the goal of protecting the dignity of human beings is served by instituting human rights and so instituting human rights can be justified by its contribution to protecting human dignity.

What does potential count for? I don't think there is a general answer here. One important variable concerns the relation between the potential time-slice person who never came to be and the entity whose development into that time-slice person was disturbed. When these two are closely related, then potential may count for a lot. When you prevent a very talented and highly trained athlete from traveling to the Olympics, then you deprive this person of her chance of a medal; and this seems quite serious because here the person prevented and the person who would have competed are very closely related (the same mature person a few days apart). But suppose the opportunity to compete in the Olympics was closed off much earlier by the parents who sent the first-grader to the chess club rather than to the gymnastics club, so that she becomes as chess lover rather than a gymnastics lover. While the world may have lost a great gymnast, this is not a substantial loss for her (because gymnastics never came to mean...

Your argument is fine so far as it goes, and it would be perfectly consistent for you to endorse moral relativism and also to protect the victims of what you consider to be wrongdoing -- for example, by locking up the perpetrators. But it would be difficult to justify such imprisonment as punishment. It is generally thought to be legitimate to punish people only when they are guilty in the minimal sense that they could or should have known that what they were doing was wrong. This is why we generally don't punish animals, children, the mentally handicapped and the temporarily insane. (To be sure, we find other ways to render them harmless in the future, but we don't think they deserve to be harmed for what they did.) Now if moral relativism were true, then there could be many views about right and wrong that are no worse supported than our own views; and then it cannot be said of the persons who acted wrongly by our lights that they should have known that what they were doing was wrong. These persons...

You might draw two distinctions here: between a situation and some way of responding to, or acting in, this situation; and between some situation or conduct requiring moral reflection and some situation or conduct being morally problematic. Pretty much any social situation requires some moral reflection: there are almost always conduct options that are wrong in that situation. For example, you might ask someone on a date in a insulting way, suggesting that you'll pay the meal only if you can have your way afterward; or you might decline a date in a humiliating way, saying that you would not want to be seen dead with so ugly a person. Such responses are morally wrong, and you need to be aware of this and avoid them. You also need to be aware that you should not ask just anyone on a date, not your student and not your friend's partner, for instance, and that you should not accept a date with such people even when they ask you out. So while many cases of offering and accepting/declining invitations on a...

I think your question is too broad. There is no general answer here, because much depends on what explanation is being offered for the behavior. An explanation of an action may justify it, may excuse it, may be a reason to forgive it, or may be none of the above. To justify an action is usually understood as claiming that the action was justified and therefore was not morally reprehensible after all. Using your example, perhaps Bob and his wife had agreed on a divorce and, while waiting for the divorce to become final, also agreed that it would be alright for them to date others. In this sort of situation, one could plausibly maintain that Bob does nothing wrong when he has an affair that he does not disclose to his wife. Or, to use another of your examples, perhaps the person Bob killed was in the midst of an attack upon an innocent person which Bob could stop only by shooting the attacker. The "none of the above" case at the other end of the spectrum is illustrated by explanations that confirm...