It seems that you have answered your own question. You write, "If Person A commits a crime . . . who is guilty of the crime?" Person A, certainly, since you write on the supposition that "Person A commits a crime . . ." Of course A isn't legally guilty until he's found guilty by a court. But I think you mean, 'Who committed the crime?' That was A. Should A be tried? He is suffering some kind of memory loss, so there are issues of competence. On the whole, if I have forgotten about a crime I have committed, it doesn't seem enough to make me innocent. A faulty memory is hardly a good defence.

If I print all the money in the world, except the money in my wallet, does it follow that the money in my pocket is unprinted? Well, it doesn't. Maybe there is another press somewhere that prints money in spite of my near monopoly. Does it make any difference if I built that press, for example if I made it over to someone else after its construction? I think on reflection that Prof. Maitzen is right about the two sentences in John . I retract the point that the second sentence is a premise for the first. I should say instead that it is a restriction and a clarification, a sort of 'Oh, and by the way, what I said means . . . " sort of amplification.

I'm not sure Prof. Maitzen is quite right about this. My answer to the original question is, 'Certainly not.' First there is the contradiction that exists if I say God created all things but did not create God, unless of course we put a heavy, suggestive emphasis on things . If I create everything except myself, then of course it follows that I do not create myself, and there is a contradiction in saying that I do, given the premise. But contra Stephen does it follow that I am uncreated? I can't see how it does. For one thing, there could be someone else who created me, Stephen for example. I think Prof. Maitzen's reading of the John passage is a bit stretched. After all, the "and" between the two sentences might suggest an amplification in the conjunction. We could then read 'All things were made by [God] . . . ' as 'All things that were made were made by God', giving the second sentence as evidence. Just a thought.

A person (from the Latin persona , mask) is merely one who has standing as a legal agent, and so, almost without exception, a person is a human being. (There is a body of law in the United States which suggests that groups of persons, in particular corporations, are also sometimes to be taken as persons, but this extension is best understood as a so-called legal fiction.) The mentally ill are persons because they are human beings. Cancer cells are not, for they are not human beings and they have no legal standing. There is not much more philosophical difficulty, as I see it, about the concept human being than there is about the concept squirrel , a member of the family Sciuridae , flat-tailed creatures, as a human being is simply a member of the species H. sapiens , a species that has "sapiens", wisdom or understanding, uses tools, and has language. The important thing is that we define the species, and then ask whether this specimen of whatever (the mentally ill person, the cancer cell)...

Translation is enormously important in philosophy. It is a philosophical topic of interest in its own right. There are issues that arise in connection with the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation and "radical translation", from scratch, associated with Quine, that call for an account of what translation actually is. Should language preserve poetry, or is it true that poetry is what is lost in translation? Is it acceptable to turn a Hebrew original into perfect English iambic pentameter, for example, as the King James Bible did, 'She gave / him of / the fruit / and he / did eat'? Or is the importation of a majestically inevitable and continuing process into the language itself a specious artifact? There is also the question whether translation into an ideal language is translation at all, or whether it is a funny kind of reconstruction. Besides all this, we have the question whether, since French and German, for example, lack an equivalent word for the English "mind", English sentences using "mind"...

If I pass the butter, that might be the right thing to do. It might also be a good thing to do, though to my ear it sounds strange, even incomprehensible, to say that it is "the good thing to do", rather than "a good thing to do". "The right thing to do" or "Doing the right thing" are phrases the tell us that an action conforms to a moral rule specifying what is right. The word “right” typically appears in principle- and rule-based connections and contexts, such as legal ones, or the rules of an organization such as a school or a military organization, or a profession with a code of principles or ethics, where what it is right to do is expressed as a given or fixed set of standards of behavior. There is as a result more of a suggestion of a present or potential criticism, so that the word “right” introduces a context in which what is wrong is something that is definitely being ruled out or is not in accordance or conformity with the principle or standard, or because it does not conform. There is some...

Stephen is right. The argument is valid, but it's not sound. It has a false premise. Even if you are a theist like me you can think that if God did not exist, there would be or could be such things as objective moral values and duties. Honesty would still be good, and we would still have a duty to help those in need. Philosophers who share my view find a great ally in Leibniz. For him, God loves the good because it is good. It is not the case that it is good because he loves it. In God reason comes before will.

I do not believe that it is a "characteristic of the present Western culture" that it is in the habit of _redefining_ everything, as if that were some sort of local parlour game. The re-definitions come about because many people are making the claim that their own views about such things as marriage and the unborn _are_ the right ones. The reason is that Western culture has become a less traditional culture, so there is less automatic acceptance of the concepts that in the past would have been inherited from the previous generation, and not questioned, or not as much. But our experience has become more extreme and more troubling. I am thinking of reactions to the Great War, for example. How could anyone whole-heartedly accept the wisdom of the Establishment when just one battle (the Battle of the Somme) resulted in 1,250,000 casualties? War in the past had a kind of nobility; not so scientific and "total" wars. "Whose testimony is to be believed?" It cannot be right to say that the definition of...

You should also read, "How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?" by Colin Radford, and the literature that developed in response to it.

I think a lot hinges in your question on the word "slightly". Is there a moral obligation to keep a promise to do something that is "slightly immoral"? I think that the answer has to be "No", since the value of duty to keep promises is not in question, and the act contemplated is only "slightly" immoral. OK, but how slightly? Would it help if you had written, "if I promise to do something that is utterly and completely immoral"? Or if you had written, "If I promise to do something that is only ever so slightly, just the teeniest barely discernible bit, immoral"? I think such gradations make a big difference, and it is not very clear how "slight" the immorality has to be before it ceases to conflict with the important general obligation to keep promises. Of course much depends also on the question to whom the promise was give, why, under what circumstances, and so on. These all need spelling out before we can address the question with any hope of answering it.

Consider two otherwise identical worlds, in one of which determinism is true, and in the other of which it is not. In the second world there is freedom of the will. What difference does this make to the legal system and the moral system? Ex hypothesi, none. When I wrote that if hard determinism is true, moral systems cannot be corrupt, I was describing Stephen's view, not my own! Hence I think the apparent contradiction that he detects. Here's another way of putting the point I wanted to make. We can imagine a deterministic world in which people are thinking good thoughts and doing good things, and making good laws. The world of law and morality seems to have survived the loss of freedom! In this world, some philosophers believe in determinism, and some in freewill. But of course the having of those beliefs is part of a deterministically produced system. There could be incidentally be a deterministic world that is morally and legally better than a world with freewill. Consider the worst world imaginable...

Your question is a very important one and has been very important historically. It has driven quite a lot of discussion about freewill. Alas, I do not agree with Stephen's answer. If hard determinism is true, which is to say that we have no free will, then, Stephen says, the legal system would be corrupt. So also would be the moral systems, including the one that allows him to use the concept corrupt . Corruption is moral depravity, and if determinism is true and it undercuts law and morals, then there is no such thing as corruption. Those like me who are compatibilists take the view that the truth of determinism would have no consequences for law and morals. The classical compatibilist makes a distinction between those actions that are caused, and those that are coerced, though this distinction is often expressed in different pairs of terms. If an action is caused and subject to scientific law, it is not unfree unless it is also coerced. One would want to include of course psychological self-coercion,...