Recent Responses
Would it be wrong to eat a cow that had been specially bred to WANT to be eaten? (a la Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy)
Charles Taliaferro
June 17, 2010
(changed June 17, 2010)
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Great question. Off hand, it seems that this would not make a difference. Presumably, it would be just as wrong to have a human child in order to harvest his organs whether or not the child had been engineered to want this fate. Sometimes wanting or consenting does make a substantial mora... Read more
When does a question becomes a philosophical question?
Charles Taliaferro
June 17, 2010
(changed June 17, 2010)
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Brilliant question. I suggest that simply to have a world-view or general outlook on what there is and its meaning or value is to have a philosophy. In this sense, virtually all persons have some kind of philosophy (even if it is highly skeptical). In this very general sense of the word '... Read more
Is it equally wrong to hurt a cow and human, if the pain experienced by each is equal?
Charles Taliaferro
June 17, 2010
(changed June 17, 2010)
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Great question. A huge amount of thought is being devoted to the assessment of the mental life of nonhuman animal. Some (but I don't think a majority) philosophers still deny that we can rightly recognize (morally relevant) pain in beings without language, but I think it is quite reasonabl... Read more
Can you give me a short answer to what is meant by "philosophy of action"?
Charles Taliaferro
June 17, 2010
(changed June 17, 2010)
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Philosophy of action concerns the analysis of agency and take up such questions as: What is it to be an agent? Is agency best explained in terms of beliefs and desires? In addition to beliefs and desires, must agency also involve a unique, additional power, such as the power to act or the p... Read more
Are there page to page commentaries on difficult philosophical works that explain more simply what's being said so that the average person at least has a fighting chance of knowing what the work says. Where does a person obtain those sorts of commentaries?
Peter Smith
June 18, 2010
(changed June 18, 2010)
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Indeed, there are all kinds of commentaries written on the works of the Great Dead Philosophers, at various levels of sophistication.
But it isn't clear to me why "the average person" would particularly want to read the works of the Great Dead Philosophers -- unless gripped by the idea that those... Read more
Assume it were discovered that certain mental aspects of a person - their temperment, their inclinations, their basic attitudes and desires - were at least partly the result of the person's genes. Now assume that a couple (for whatever reason) decides that they want their child to be an energetic, extroverted, optimistic and competitive; or that they decide they want a calm, collected, intelligent, questioning and cooperative child; or any other variation. They then go on to their doctor and have the embryo's genes modified such that their child will have these qualities. Is the control exercised over the child's fundamental nature an imposition of the parents' wills onto the will of the child? And is a person whose will has been designed by another will as free as a will that has not been designed at all?
Charles Taliaferro
June 17, 2010
(changed June 17, 2010)
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Excellent question. It is excellent partly because it goes to the heart of the nature of freedom: freedom makes little sense without a context. So, it makes sense to ask of a person at any time whether she or he is free to do X, but in the case you are imagining there is no will of the chi... Read more
Are there any extensive philosophical examinations of a link between aesthetics and ethics? I had heard that Nietzsche and Rousseau, for example, argued that the two were fundamentally linked. Specifically, I am curious as to whether any philosophers have advanced the position that ethics and morality are sub-fields of aesthetics (an "Aesthetics of Human Behavior", if you will).
Charles Taliaferro
June 17, 2010
(changed June 17, 2010)
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Great question. In a sense, the claim (or assumption) that there is a link between a major aesthetic category beauty and ethics / morality goes back to Plato. From a Platonic point of view, is some act is wicked, it is evil, and if some act is ethical it is beautiful (or, in difficult mat... Read more
Is the lack of consent the only argument against pedophilia? I ask because it doesn't seem like a very good argument against pedophilia. On this logic, feeding a child would be a criminal act unless the child understood the reason they were eating.
Allen Stairs
June 17, 2010
(changed June 17, 2010)
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Lack of consent isn't the only argument, but I doubt that anyone ever thought it was. Roughly, we think we need consent when we think the person might reasonably object if they only knew about or understood what was being done to them. In the case of pedophilia, there's plenty of reason to think... Read more
I recently overheard a man saying he was kicked out of his apartment because he "peeped on" his female roommate in the shower. He said, "A peeping tom isn't hurting anyone." I don't think this is universal, but, to what extent is he right?
Miriam Solomon
June 17, 2010
(changed June 17, 2010)
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If the peeping Tom didn't hurt anyone, why did he get kicked out of his apartment? Perhaps Tom would say, "An undiscovered peeping Tom isn't hurting anyone." But is he right about even that qualified claim? Even if he isn't hurting anybody, his action may still be wrong (e.g. it may violate t... Read more
If everyone consistently uses a word wrong, does that eventually become the right way to use the word?
Amy Kind
June 16, 2010
(changed June 16, 2010)
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In thinking about your question, we might recall the conversation between Humpty Dumpty and Alice in Through the Looking Glass. At one point, Humpty Dumpty exclaims "There's glory for you." Alice protests that she doesn't know what he means.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don'... Read more