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You are an amazing website! I have told many people about you guys. We greatly appreciate your kind services. I feel smarter and like I have learned something after having visited your site. Here's a hard question. I heard it on a television called the Office. Can you steal food in order to feed your starving family? If so, why? I know, you want your family to survive. But still, stealing is a crime. Would you even *murder* to feed your family? Where do we draw the line? Who determines? The best philosophers? Doesn't G-d decide because he made us and the world? Many Thanks!
Charles Taliaferro
November 28, 2010
(changed November 28, 2010)
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Thank you for your kind words about this site! Your question is very difficult. To pick up your last suggestion: if there is an all good Creator who sustains the cosmos, and this G-d commands that the hungry be fed, then there would be an obligation for those with surplus food to g... Read more
It seems plausible that a person might do something they don't want to do, without any external pressure. For example, a person on a diet might cheat and eat a bar of chocolate, even though they don't want to cheat; or a person trying to quit smoking might smoke a cigarette even if they don't want to smoke the cigarette. And yet, these are actions which require conscious activity in order to complete - these aren't accidents, and so it seems fair to say that, on some level, even if the person on a diet doesn't want to eat the chocolate, he or she does, in fact, want to eat the chocolate. This seems absolutely contradictory - yet surely, everybody has, at some point or another in their life, given in to some temptation despite not wanting to, or otherwise done something that they, in strong terms, did not want to do, even though they weren't forced to do so. How, then, are we to make sense of such situations? It seems logically impossible to both want to eat something and to want to refrain from eating something; in effect, the statement "I want to eat that chocolate bar" is simultaneously true and false. What sorts of statements can be both at once? Is it enough to just say that people have many different, competing wants? Is the will, then, a fractured entity, or not an entity at all? Would not notions such as guilt and responsibility need to be radically overlooked if we were to assume that a person's will is just a fractured jumble of dozens of competing, mutually exclusive desires?
Charles Taliaferro
November 28, 2010
(changed November 28, 2010)
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Excellent question(s)! To begin, it may be mis-leading to think of the "will" as an entity, whether substantial or framented. It is perhaps more plausable to think of the "will" as an abstract way of referring to a person's intentional powers, so that to say that a person has free... Read more
I am thirteen years old and I do not understand the world. In terms of world hunger, how can one possibly find happiness in their lives when such tragedies exist? Approximately 24,000 thousand people starved to death today, and three billion people live with under two dollars every day. For one to continue their lives as normal, or even not give any care, would this be the equivalence of starving someone yourself since you have the power to make a difference, yet you are choosing not to? And is the root cause of poverty a lack of equality within the world, or are specific governments not running thing effectively? For people that are not actively practicing compassion, would that make you a horrible person for not wanting to aleviate the extent of pain and suffering that so many have to endure day after day?
Gordon Marino
December 2, 2010
(changed December 2, 2010)
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A very good question - how can we happy in this world of seemingly boundless suffering? Of course, we could always get into the "it all depends what you mean by happiness" semantics game but lets not go there. Whatever the good life is, it will have to include a connection with other humans... Read more
There is this idea that languages can be judged and valued - take the very stereotypical image of the proud French person praising their own language's beauty and warmth while explaining that English is an impure, soulless and emotionless tongue with "stolen" vocabulary. Is the idea that languages can be judged and praised/scorned (sort of like works of art) rooted in a theory of linguistic aesthetics? Has such a theory ever been articulated? More to the point, are there any general justifications for such views, or are words really just words?
Mitch Green
November 27, 2010
(changed November 27, 2010)
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You ask, first of all, whether the idea that languages can be judged and praised/scorned is rooted in a theory of linguistic aesthetics. Well, that might be one basis on which to evaluate a language; there may be others, such as those I'll mention below. Also, I don't know of any substant... Read more
Is there a difference between liberty and freedom? From listening to people and reading about the issue, it seems that they are used synonymously.
Sean Greenberg
November 27, 2010
(changed November 27, 2010)
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This is a very interesting question indeed. It does seem that today, the words are often used interchangeably. However, there are etymological differences between the words which suggest that at least originally, they were used in different senses. Very roughly, liberty seems to have... Read more
Is there a fundamental link between behavior we view as immoral, and behavior we view as repulsive, disgusting, or otherwise aesthetically unpleasant? It seems the terms of the latter are sometimes used to describe the former.
Sean Greenberg
November 27, 2010
(changed November 27, 2010)
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You're absolutely right that aesthetic terms are sometimes used to characterize action. Whether, however, there is an internal or conceptual or fundamental connection between judging an action in such aesthetic terms and judging it morally is a difficult question. In the early modern p... Read more
I'm interested in creativity and gender: specifically why the discussion of women writers seems to get extraordinarily fraught when one throws in the idea of motherhood. I have seen young female writers write long manifestos about why they'll never be mothers because motherhood will interfere with their work; I've seen how mostly women who are granted bona fide "genius" status are childless (Austen, Dickinson, Eliot, Wharton, O'Connor, Welty). It is less severe today, but still exists: our only universally recognized feminine "geniuses" seem to be the non-mothers Zadie Smith, Joyce Carol Oates, and, of the six female Nobel laureates in literature in the past twenty years, only one half--Morrison, Lessing, and Gordimer--had children, which can't be representative of either the population of women in toto, or that of women who are writers. Worse, and this may simply be an assumption on my part, but oftentimes women don't get judged as "important" as their male counterparts until they are beyond the age of fertility. What's terrible is that I, a woman and feminist, find myself making the same shameful assumption of "lessening" when I know a female writer's biography. Why does this not happen to men who are fathers? Is there a mind-body prejudice that's happening? Is it entirely a perceived effect, or can there be argued that there's a real lessening in ability--not merely based on societal gender roles--but one based in the body itself? Or in language: see, for instance the ingrained judgment involved between a "seminal" writer and a "prolific" writer. Is there such a thing as "creativity" studies? Where can I go to read more? Thank you.
Oliver Leaman
November 26, 2010
(changed November 26, 2010)
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No doubt there is a debate on this topic in the literature, but whatever this says, it is surely the case that in most societies mothers are obliged to spend longer looking after their children than are fathers, and this obviously has an impact on the other things they can do. Writing is... Read more
My landlord has a terrible fear of rats. Over the summer, a young stray cat started hanging around the brownstone meowing for affection and food. My landlord started feeding the cat, and even put a box for it to stay in, because he is convinced that having the cat living in front of our building will scare away rats. But now it's late fall and getting colder; the cat is looking more and more desperate and sad. I'm afraid it won't last much longer out there. So here's the question: having benefited from the cat's predicament, is my landlord now morally responsible in any way for the cat's eventual fate? Is he under a moral obligation to take the cat inside, or to a shelter, etc? Similarly, am I, having indirectly benefited, under any moral obligation to the cat?
Oliver Leaman
November 26, 2010
(changed November 26, 2010)
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I think so, it is not as though the costs of looking after the animal are immense. If one can prevent harm to a sentient being then one ought to, other things being equal.
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If we take an action as something I voluntarily do, does it ever make sense to say that reason causes me to act? Reason can tell me that smoking is bad for my health, so if I quit was reason the cause of my quitting? Without a desire to quit it seems that all the reasons in the world won't cause me to do anything. So, it really is that simple? Reasons are never causes?
Sean Greenberg
November 26, 2010
(changed November 26, 2010)
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This is a fascinating nest of issues!! It has been claimed that reasons are fundamentally different from causes, but it has also been claimed that reasons are causes--maybe a different kind of cause from the cause that makes it the case that putting a weight on a balance moves its arm d... Read more
Is it possible for animals to commit moral wrongs? For instance, bottlenose dolphins are supposedly known to torment and even rape other dolphins. Many of the capacities once thought unique to humans (language, tool-use etc.) are now commonly ascribed to certain animals; but I've yet to see anyone claim that animals are capable of immorality.
Sean Greenberg
November 26, 2010
(changed November 26, 2010)
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It seems to me that in order for an agent to act rightly or wrongly, morally or immorally, s/he must be capable of having the concepts of right and wrong, moral and immoral: consequently, it seems to me that if certain animals were discovered to have the ability to have such concepts, th... Read more