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When a person's irresponsible behavior leads to the death of another person such as the case of drunk driving we naturally assign culpability to that person. Should a person who's irresponsible behavior leads to them being raped be held to a degree of moral culpabilty? To what degree if any?
Charles Taliaferro
April 16, 2011
(changed April 16, 2011)
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Interesting questions. I suggest that the disanalogies of the two cases are quite significant. In the drunk driving case, the person drunk is (usually) the direct cause of the death. In the case of rape, the person being raped cannot be the direct cause of the harm. In most, if not all... Read more
Dear Philosophers, My question is about the morality of actions in games. Can our behaviors in a game - however friendly or cruel if they are inside the borders of the game's rules - be regarded as immoral acts? For example, is hitting a person during a game a sort of immoral act? (in this case I know that it might be punished by the referee but is the act in itself immoral?) What about deceiving your rival in a game? Is it lie and thus an immoral behavior? and killing (suppose there is a game in which two people agree on a fight which would end in one side's death)? Thanks.
Charles Taliaferro
April 15, 2011
(changed April 15, 2011)
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Great set of quetions. I think the concept of a game has shifted. In Ancient Rome, "games" included gladiator fights to the death, but today any intentional killing in the course of a game would be seen as no longer a game. If in the middle of a baseball game the batter beat the short s... Read more
I have been an atheist for some time and I recently realized something that I am curious about. Resulting from depression I have come to see that through resenting myself I create distance with those around me. At the same time I have no purpose to a creator (being an atheist) to live and life seems to become bleak. I began to wonder and feel that the more I begin again to care about people the more I realize how essential they are to an atheist life. When caring about people we find our God or purpose so to speak. Do philosophers say anything about how without God you must care about people to feel like life has purpose beyond hedonism? Any expansion to my question is fine since I am pretty hazy due to feeling down these days. Thanks
Charles Taliaferro
April 15, 2011
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As a theist, I would love to welcome you back, but in all honesty I suggest that atheistic philosophers have worked quite hard to argue that life without God can be deep and satisfying and while pleasurable not hedonistic. In fact, one member of this panel, Louise Antony has edited a book... Read more
Legal status aside, is a person who steals $1,000 from a very rich person acting just as unethically as a person who steals $1,000 from a poor person?
Charles Taliaferro
April 15, 2011
(changed April 15, 2011)
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Very interesting! Maybe not. If both cases involved equal malice and hate or the money was extracted with the same amount of violence, we might think both thieves are equally worthy of blame. Obviously the first thief has done more damage because a rich person is less vulnerable to extr... Read more
A common criticism against the so-called New Atheists -- e.g., Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers, Sam Harris, etc. -- is that they are philosophically naive and accept an unreflective, dogmatic scientism. Is this a fair point?
Jasper Reid
April 15, 2011
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Well, there are several distinct points here, so let's take them one by one.
I don't pretend to be an expert on those guys, but I have looked at them a little bit, and the impression I have is that, yes, they are philosophically rather naive. Indeed, that's the very reason why I've never bothered... Read more
Are emotions involved in conclusions/reaching conclusions in mathematics?
Peter Smith
April 14, 2011
(changed April 14, 2011)
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Emotions are not involved in any direct way in our mathematical conclusions (for the conclusions are about numbers, or groups, or vector spaces, or sets, or whatever, not about human things like emotions.) And whether a purported conclusion is indeed a mathematical truth is an objective matter: a... Read more
It seems to me that if I am morally responsible for X and if I know that X causes Y (with 100% probability) then I'm also responsible (in the same degree) for Y. So, if I know that we all die, and if I accept that I am morally responsible for having created a new human being, does it mean that I have to consider myself responsible for the (future, but certain) death of my child? I know there's a whole nest of problems there with causality, choice, consequentialism, but I think the assumptions can be made very weak and very "reasonable" in order to provide a valid "prima facie" argument. What do you think?
Allen Stairs
April 14, 2011
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You're right, of course: there's a tangle of problems here about causation, consequence and the like. It seems a little odd to my ears to say that by fathering a child, I am a cause of its eventual death, but that may just be me. Perhaps we can avoid the issue about "cause" by simply noting this... Read more
Generally we suppose that if there is any time lapse between event A and a subsequent event B, A cannot be the cause of B. But what if time were continuous, such that between any times t1 and t2, we might specify a distinct time t3? In that case, there would always be some time lapse between any two events: would that make causation as described impossible? Does conceiving of time as quantized solve the problem?
Donald Baxter
April 21, 2011
(changed April 21, 2011)
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Alternatively, Bertrand Russell uses the problem you raise to critique the Humean account of causation and propose a successor. See Russell's discussion of laws of change in his book The Analysis of Mind.
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When I multiply 2 by 2, is it by a form of reasoning that I produce the result, or rather mere memorization? Does the same hold for multiplications of larger numbers, or arithmetic operations generally?
William Rapaport
April 14, 2011
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When an elementary-school student is learning how to multiply, the result of multiplying 2 by 2 is probably produced by a form of reasoning (perhaps repeated addition). When you or I do it, it's probably done by rote memory. But when any of us multiply two 6-digit numbers, it's almost cert... Read more
Some people say, hopefully with a good dose of irony, that murder is a victimless crime. In a twisted sense, this is almost true; once murder has been committed, the victim no longer exists (not as a person at least, though as a corpse), and as long as the victim still exists, no murder has taken place. So why is it that we find the thought of murder abhorrent? Unlike rape or torture or even theft, in the case of murder, we're not around to suffer the consequences of the murder (assuming the murder wasn't preceded by other crimes), because we're just not around anymore. I think it was Mark Twain who said that, having not existed for millions of years prior to his birth, he surely wouldn't mind not existing after his death. So why is (unprovoked) murder one of the worst crimes there is, in almost all societies? Is it the fear of death? Is it because we don't want to witness others dying?
Sean Greenberg
April 11, 2011
(changed April 11, 2011)
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The remark that murder is a victimless crime, while surely ironic, hits home. As Alexander George remarked a while back on this site in response to a related question, "death is rather peculiar...in that it's a misfortune that eliminates from the world the subject of the misfortune." Alex we... Read more