Recent Responses
Is it morally wrong to stop being freinds with someone because he/she is a homophobe? I'm gay but have many straight friends. One of them is Muslim, and she maintains that as part of her religious beliefs it is mandatory for her to consider homosexuality a sin, that is punishable by an afterlife in "hell". She also does not oppose persecutions of gays in Islamic countries saying that it is their sovereignty that can not be infringed in the name of Human Rights. (She thinks the Koran is more important than any human rights declaration.) That said, she's been a very kind, helpful and longtime friend, but her attitude towards homosexuality is unacceptable for me. Is it morally tenable for her to be a friend to a gay man, and a homophobe at the same time? Is it immoral/unethical for me to dump her because of her religious beliefs?
Oliver Leaman
June 2, 2011
(changed June 2, 2011)
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If we could only like people who share our views, our circle of friends would be very narrow.
Most of my religous friends are convinced that in the next world we shall never meet again, since they are going to one place, and I very definitely am going somewhere rather warmer and less pleasant. I v... Read more
Most people, I'd guess, have racial preferences in dating. I don't think that this is morally problematic in itself, since there is surely no obligation to date anyone, or members of any particular group. Still it strikes me that many cases of racial preference in dating are likely rooted in racism. For instance, I have never been attracted to black women; and while I would insist that I have no duty to be anything like an equal opportunity dater, I strongly suspect that my preference in this case is at least partially the result of racial prejudice. (I imagine that I would more often find myself attracted to black women if I had not internalized various stereotypes, racially-based aesthetic norms, etc.) Is this a problem? Does it matter to our evaluation of a particular attitude if, though perhaps innocuous in itself, it has a causal origin in bigotry?
Oliver Leaman
June 2, 2011
(changed June 2, 2011)
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I doubt whether we should feel that we ought always to treat everyone entirely equally to avoid being called racist. We are allowed to have preferences and sometimes these will be on racial grounds, perhaps, provided that those preferences do not systematically discriminate against people in ways t... Read more
In Kazakhstan three per cent of the population own all the land. Seventy five per cent of the laws in this country concern property Therefore, in Kazakhstan, seventy five per cent of the laws are made for three per cent of the people. Am I right in feeling that this is very unjust country?
Oliver Leaman
June 2, 2011
(changed June 2, 2011)
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Not necessarily. It might after all be in the interests of the majority of the population that the land is owned by a small minority. Perhaps they also deserve to own it, since they acquired it through hard work and merit.
On the other hand, as you imply, this is unlikely so we are probably in the... Read more
A majority of feminists as I understand them argue that the per se enjoyment of the physical body and particularly the female form is a form of "objectification". I completely disagree because in my opinion the female form has aesthetic qualities that are not "object" like at all and are actually quite human and therefor the appreciation of the female form is not objectification. Are there feminists who agree with that stance?
Sean Greenberg
May 31, 2011
(changed May 31, 2011)
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Many philosophers committed to feminism are concerned with 'objectification', i.e., roughly, treating a person--often, as in this case and henceforth, a woman--as a thing in some way. While the concept of objectification is slippery, as noted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on th... Read more
When I see myself through Freudian glasses, my behaviors, fears, and understanding suddenly make sense. I can see how I might have repressed certain feelings which, as an adult, have led me to behave neurotically; and I can see how cultures, in order to deal with social anxieties, create political institutions and cultivate their own forms of art. When I think of the world from a Freudian perspective, everything makes sense. When I read theorists like Adorno and Horkheimer, Freud makes even more sense. But we're told that modern neuroscience has largely done away with Freud's ideas, or at least revised them so drastically that we wouldn't recognize them as belonging to Freud. What do we then do with the body of literature that seemed to clarify so much of our behavior, now that scientists are telling us that it's based on a pseudoscience? In particular, I'm reading Hermann Hesse's novel Demian right now. It mirrors my own experiences of growing up, searching for meaning, and trying to overcome the tether which keeps me bound to a simplistic purity represented by childhood. But the story it tells is based on a Freudian interpretation of growing up. If I'm trying to understand myself better, should I dismiss the relationship between the symbols in the book and my own experiences? Are these relationships a trick of my mind, since I'm hardwired to find meaning anyway? I'd hate to dismiss what seems like a perfect model of my mind, but I really don't want to put stock in a pseudoscience that promises to give me understanding but really just gives me a set of complexes to deal with. Thoughts?
Sean Greenberg
May 31, 2011
(changed May 31, 2011)
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The great poet W. H. Auden wrote, in "In Memory of Sigmund Freud":"If often he was wrong and, at times, absurdTo us is no more a personNow but a whole climate of opinion."Freud's 'deepening' of the mind is now, I think--and rightly so--part of our 'folk psychology': that is, we understand each oth... Read more
What does it mean to say that it is impossible for there to be such a thing as a neutral, or objective, observer? When a person walks into a white room that it empty except for themselves and a chair, is asked to describe the room and says "It's a white room with a chair in it", it would seem that the situation they are in meets all the usual criteria for objectivity and neutrality. Certainly, it might be debatable whether the chair is a chair or a stool or a bench, and whether the white is really white or has been marred beige-grey by time, but either way, operating with a definition of chair and a definition of white, the conclusion is inevitable. So when philosophers say objective judgements are impossible, where do such banal statements about the physical world fall in?
Charles Taliaferro
May 30, 2011
(changed May 30, 2011)
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There are some philosophers who think that human observations will always be from some subjective point of view. Indeed, modern philosophers have often thought that the secondary properties of objects (how an object looks, what it smells like, for example) will reflect the cognitive powers of... Read more
Why are people so skeptical about the notion that a sufficiently advanced computer program could replicate human intelligence (meaning free will insofar as humans have it; motivation and creativity; comparable problem-solving and communicative capacities; etc.)? If humans are intelligent in the way we are because of the way our brains are built, than a computer could be constructed that replicates the structure of our brains (incorporating fuzzy logic, neural networks, chemical analogs, etc). Worst comes to absolute worst, a sufficiently powerful molecular simulator could run a full simulation of a human brain or human body, down to each individual atom. So there doesn't seem to be anything inherent in the physicality of humans that makes it impossible to build machines with our intelligence, since we can replicate physical structures in machines easily enough. If, however, humans are intelligent for reasons that do not have anything to do with the physical structure of our brains or bodies - if there is some immaterial reason for consciousness, free will or other aspects of our intelligence - than we're essentially talking about souls. And if souls don't just supervene on physical phenomena (which is the entire nature of this fork of the problem - if they did supervene, we'd be back at the first point), then why shouldn't machines, too, be able have souls? Maybe they already do. The only way to escape this and continue to assert that machines could never possess human intelligence is to say that there is a god, or a group of gods, who decide what gets to have souls and what doesn't, and machines aren't on the list. But outside of theistic circles, this argument can't be expected to carry any weight for as long as people are skeptical about theism in general. So what leads so many people to believe that machines could never replicate a human intelligence?
Allen Stairs
May 30, 2011
(changed May 30, 2011)
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My colleague and I disagree somewhat here, though perhaps on everything essential to your question, we agree.
We all agree that in principle the right kind of "machine" could be every bit as conscious, free, etc.as you and I. And Prof. Nahmias may well be right when he says that if a robot of the C3... Read more
Is it moral for me as a transexual to expect others to treat me as female? Is this a basic right of self-identification or am I inappropriately impinging my will on others?
Thomas Pogge
May 29, 2011
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You mean the word "expect" in a normative sense, I take it. You are asking others to accept and respect your self-identification and suggesting to them that they ought to accept and respect it. So you are asking for more than a basic right of self-identification. Still, I think what you ask is reaso... Read more
A statement P about a single element in a dual or multiple set does not seem to logically exclude P applying equally to other elements in the set; yet we often talk as though "P is true of X" implies "P is not true of Y (or Z)", when X, Y, and Z all belong to some grouping. For example, take "Men work to support their families". Does this logically imply that women do not work to support their families? What about "African Americans suffer from discrimination"? Does this logically imply that Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans and white Americans (among other racial groupings) do not suffer from discrimination? Such objections are often raised in discourse. Given (x, y), "P is true of X" is thought to imply "P is not true of Y", or "Not-P is true of Y". If there is no logical exclusion above, what are these objections targeting? Is it a question of salience, rather than logic?
Mitch Green
May 28, 2011
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Thank you for your good question! Answering questions of this general type has been a big concern of the field of philosophy of language for the last few decades. One way of starting to understand where this tradition is coming from, is to distinguish between the literal meaning of a sentence, and... Read more
Why are insults that refer to a person's personality, lifestyle or hobbies considered more acceptable (or at least less serious) than insults to a person's race, sex or disability? I used to think that it was because personality, lifestyle and hobbies are mutable, whereas race, sex and disability are things a person has no control over - yet there are plenty of examples to the contrary (Many personalities don't change without outside intervention; transsexuals change their physiological sex; disabilities can be the result of one's own voluntary actions; Micheal Jackson went white; etc.). Not only that, but why should it matter whether or not a person has control over the things being made fun of? I only see two possibilities. First, it could be a question of fairness - in which case, why is it fair to insult things that a person can change but that are nevertheless a part of them as human beings? This brings me to the second possibility - maybe we are implicitly endorsing a norm like "If the insults bother you, change yourself." Yet this seems horrendously unfair and authoritarian. So why does society accept insults to or disrespect of a person based on their personality (shyness, clumsiness, taste in the arts, etc.), their lifestyle (polyamorists, hippies, S/M practitioners, etc.) or their hobbies (painting miniature soldiers, playing video games, carrying dogs around in their purses)?
Charles Taliaferro
May 28, 2011
(changed May 28, 2011)
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Great questions and suggestions! Perhaps, though, one needs to back up a bit and consider whether anything we would call an insult is morally in the clear. Off hand, it strikes me that there is a huge difference between offering criticism about some practice or a person's behavior and insult... Read more