You have certainly put your finger on a complex issue. One might say you've got a dragon by the tail. First, I should call your attention to the fact that you've rendered his argument in two logically different ways. The first rendering is actually a valid form of deductive inference, not a fallacy. Philosophers, in their pretentious way, call it a modus tollens. The terms in which you've put it allow for this rendering: 1. If Not-P, then Not-Q. 2. Q. 3. Therefore, P. And, by the way, that first rendering can also be restated in another valid form called a modus ponens: 1. If we have knowledge (Q), then we understand or acknowledge the law of cause and effect (P). 2. We have knowledge (Q). 3. Therefore, we understand or acknowledge the law of cause and effect (P). There's a rather large issue lurking here, too, as to what "understanding" and "acknowledging" mean, how they're similar, how they're different. (See, for example, Stanley Cavell's, "Knowing and...

You boil things down very effectively. To respond in kind: There's not, and he or she can. But that doesn't make conversation, debate, argument, etc. about capital punishment pointless. Why not? Because there's more to discourse about morals than vehement insistence. Moral conversations can shape participants values, their sentiments, their ways of seeing things so that they come to feel and think differently about issues like capital punishment. Participants might be unaware of certain facts (such as the ways race and class and error play into capital punishment or the effects of capital punishment on those who administer it). They might be unaware of various logical inconsistencies in their positions (for example, the inconsistency between capital punishment and the 8th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment). They might through the course of their conversation come to change their metaphysical commitments (for example, about the nature of a person or...

Consider the question, ‘Is cannibalism morally wrong?’ One can first ask whether this question is about some sort of fact. And if it isn’t, does that mean that all possible answers are personal opinions, social conventions, or something else such that ‘true’ and ‘false’ simply have no meaning here. Of course, even if there is a fact of the matter with regard to this question (and hence it makes sense to say that answers to the question may be either true or false), could anyone ever know what it is? Those who think there are facts of the form ‘such and such is morally right or wrong’ are called moral realists. If, in addition, they think that such facts can be known, they are called cognitivists. Those who deny there is any fact of the matter about which acts are morally wrong are called non-realists or anti-realists. Some non-realists think that their position entails that all moral judgements are therefore meaningless. But others disagree. They think that although there are no moral facts, or anyway...

You ask a powerful and intriguing question. From where I sit, feminism ought to work towards a delicate balance of celebrating diversity and downplaying difference. Diversity should continue to be celebrated in the name of liberty so that our society is able to support maximal forms of human self-expression. Diversity should also be celbrated as a sort of vaccination against the oppressive potential of sameness. It's often the case that sameness--or the downplaying of difference--is achieved by repressing some people towards the end of re-making them in the image of other people. On the other hand, the very ideas of woman and man (feminine/masculine) need to be undermined or at least loosened up a bit. Celebrating women (as a category opposed or differentiated in its contrast to men) can also constrain people by establishing confining norms about what it means to be a 'real' woman. Part of loosening the idea of woman will mean expanding it to include a diversity of woman, but part of it also...

No, I think there are times when it's better to conceal the truth. Part of wisdom in ethics involves not just being truthful but knowing when and how the truth should be told. Mind you, there are good reasons for being maximally truthful; but they do not count in every case.

For myself, I see no third option and I think the trade-off between retribution and restoration to be a difficult one. It is likelly that both forms of justice should play a role in transitional situations. But it's also likely that the contingent features of a particular situation--the differences iin history, culture, the nature and extent of prior injustice, etc.--will effect the balance between the two. My own assessment of the experiments tried so far suggest that the greater a culture's capacity to achieve some sense of restoration the more promising the prospects for the establishment of a just society in the future. If that's true, then the objective should be to maximize restoration and minimize retribution.

There seems to be no single property or feature of things that makes them look good or bad. Different things will look good or bad for different reasons in different contexts. A sculpture might look good for one reason and a painting for another. A sculpture might look good in the contexts of academia or fine art but bad as an sacred object in a religious context or as an ornament in the contexts of home or office. A scuplture of one period or sub-genre or culture might look for reasons different from those that make the sculpture of another period or sub-genre or culture. In general, however, I'd say this. Looking good or bad will involve (a) the qualities of the object itself (its color, shape, texture, proportions, etc.), (b) the relationship of the object to its immediate environment or setting, © the relationship it has to other objects of its kind, both not and historically; and (d) the context of meanings and criteria that those who are judging the object bring to their assessment of it.

For myself, I hold onto some hopes.Rather enormous changes have occurred before. They could happen again. Consider the change of status of women, the abolition of slavery, industrialization, etc. It's difficult to imagine France and Britain going to war again, even though they were combatants for centuries. If peace can be achieved between them, why not others, why not all? So, I think a warless world possible. How likely is it? Would it be possible to establish a lasting or even perpetual peace? The probabilitiies at the moment look law given the high levels of consumption demanded by modern economies. That is, modern societies are engineered for war. It will be difficult to change that, but I think it's possible. I also think working towards that goal not only morally desirable but even morally imperative. That is, it's really a duty of all civilized people to try to achieve a peaceful and just world. That's because the sort of mass killing, waste, and destruction charcteristic of war are...

While it's right to say that philosophy has no single distinctive method, over time it has developed what I suppose could be called families or quivers of methods and tools. In some ways this collection has also determined the distinctive character of philosophy as a form of investigation. Among these tools and methods, I'd include things like: logic, yes, but also dialectic, transcendental argument, thought experiments, reductions, and intuition pumps; then there's normative principles of thought like Ockham's razor, Leibniz's law of identity, the principle of sufficient reason, and the principle of saving the phenomena; there are critical techniques like those related to class, sex, power, and race; there are conceptual distinctions used to analyze and order ideas like essence/accident, think/thin, acquaintance/description, a priori/a posteriori, categorical/modal; there are grounding ideas like those of 'basic', 'primitive', 'complete,' 'self-evident,' and indefeasable.

One might say, I suppose, in a kind of sociological way that Christianity is whatever Christians say it is. So, if people who call themselves Christians endorse capital punishment or punishments of other kinds, then those practices are Christian practices. But this isn't terribly satisfying for many, because people wish to believe that there is some sort of "true" Christianity against which the practices of people who call themselves Christians can be tested. And, anwyay, after all it does seem that it should be meaningful to speak of better and worse Christians. For myself, I think it probably impossible to speak of true Christianity in general. It is, however, I think meaningful to consider whether or not people meet the standards of Christianity they themselves or at least the authorities of their sects endorse. So, while it may be impossible to speak of better and worse Christians in general, one might speak of better and worse Catholics or Presbyterians or Baptists. According to the...