Is racial profiling against Muslims morally permissible under any circumstances? If so, why?

I wonder if you meant "impermissible" rather than "permissible", but either way I'll try to address the question. With respect to any ethical principle, at almost any level of abstraction, it's hard to say that it applies under literally any circumstance (maybe "do the right thing" is an exception, but it obviously doesn't help much). "Never torture innocent children" seems a pretty secure principle, yet it's not hard to devise a situation in which maybe one has to violate it - say the fate of millions of lives really depends on torturing this one child. (Leave aside how you can know that this is so, a real problem for alleged "ticking bomb" scenarios.) So I would say any kind of racial profiling is wrong because it violates certain basic rights, especially the right to be treated with dignity and to be treated fairly under the rule of law - which means that you have to have specifically done something to be singled out for negative treatment. But like all rights, this one too can be swamped by...

First of all, Congratulations on this excellent website. It is a pleasure to discover a place on the Internet where the public may present philosophical questions for review by experts. My question is in regards to selflessness and selfishness. I view self-sacrifice as noble and a moral good, and that selfishness is repugnant and a moral wrong. With this in mind, I would like to ask about how to counter an idea posed in a quote by Ayn Rand: “Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Does virtue consist of serving vice?” Can this view of selflessness be countered? I am essentially concerned about if an act of selflessness/self-sacrifice merely allows a selfishness elsewhere to be validated and to profit. Does a selfless act, by necessity, exist with and serve a selfishness?...

Your question reminds me of a quote that a friend uses as her email signature: "If I'm here to serve others, what are the others here for?" There is an important point here, and it's one that Rand is getting at, namely: an ethics of pure selflessness is, if perhaps not incoherent, at least ungrounded. It must be okay for people to enjoy certain benefits if it's morally worthy for others to work to secure those benefits for them. However, Rand then goes to the other extreme, endorsing instead an ethics of pure selfishness. One can readily acknowledge both the legitimacy of self-concern and the obligation to concern oneself with the welfare of others. There is no contradiction. So, for instance, on a utilitarian conception of justice, one gets to count one's own utility as fully as anyone else's. If helping another would involve a great sacrifice on one's own part, assuming the benefit to the other is not correspondingly greater, one is not obliged to make the sacrifice. But, it is still...

Does it follow from materialism that we should be able to infer literally anything there is to know about a person's consciousness (feelings, memories, etc.) from publicly observable facts about their brain and body? If we had perfect neurological knowledge, is there anything that might yet elude our observation?

Since you said "literally anything", almost all philosophers would agree that the answer is "no, it doesn't follow from materialism". For one thing, there are facts about consciousness, memory, etc., that depend upon facts external to the body. So, for instance, whether I really remember an event is determined in part by whether or not it really occurred. But, if we leave aside these sorts of external facts - which is probably what you had in mind anyway - then there is a hot dispute in philosophy of mind over this very question. Some philosophers, like David Chalmers and Frank Jackson, have argued that if materialism is true then all the facts about consciousness, such as what it's like to have sensory experiences, should be in principle derivable from a complete physical description of the relevant person's body (or brain). Other philosophers, myself included, have argued that materialism, as a metaphysical thesis, is not committed to this consequence. The idea is that though mental states are...

Why is it so widely accepted that human beings have intangible rights such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Humans as a part of nature, have these "rights" broken all the time by other humans and our environments. Do you think this may have to do with a strong desire to feel secure in the world we live in? It seems that in reality, the only natural rights are granted by whether or not you have the power to seize them.

I'm not sure what you mean by "intangible" here, but no matter. It strikes me that the question is based on assimilating the existence of a right to its observance. It may well be, and I believe it is, that rights are being violated all the time. I don't see how that is evidence that one doesn't have any rights, unless of course what one means by having rights is having them respected. But why think that? Now another question one might ask is, if there is such wholesale violation of rights, what good do they do me? Here I think the answer is, sometimes very little. Still, moral obligations, to which rights give rise, hold even if people by and large don't carry them out. Also, I think we do find many domains in which people making moral arguments does serve to change behavior for the better, and it's crucial to the cogency of such arguments that there really exist the rights and duties to which they appeal.

When I feel a pain in my hand, is there anything about the pain which actually refers to my hand, or have I simply learned over time that certain pains are correlated with injuries in certain parts of my body?

If you just reflect on your own experience you can see that the feeling that the pain is in your hand is not merely a matter of having learned over time that certain feelings are caused by damage in certain areas; on the contrary, your hand, as we say, "hurts". Infants clearly show recognition of the locations of pains in their bodies, and yet they certainly haven't had sufficient experience to learn the requisite correlations. Also, notice that sometimes we're wrong. This happens with tooth pain a lot. We feel the pain in one tooth but it's actually caused by damage in a different tooth. How would this mistake even occur if there weren't something inherent in the feeling itself concerning which tooth hurt? One fairly simple way to account for the localization of pains is this: The relevant nerves in the damaged area send signals to the pain centers of the brain, which represent both the damage and the location of the damage. The identities of the nerves from which the message emanated, or their...
War

Is it better to fight fairly and risk higher casualties than to fight unfairly and thereby reduce casualties? I think many of us have the intuition that war nowadays, despite incurring many fewer casualties than wars past, is much more disturbing for the fact that killing (e.g., by dropping bombs) (1) is so easy and (2) typically does not allow opponents any real self-defense. Is there anything to be said for a fair fight in war, or should our sole moral object be to minimize overall casualties?

First, I would take issue with the claim that war nowadays causes many fewer casualties. While this may be true for soldiers in the armed forces of modern industrial societies, it is clearly not so for the civilian population or even for the soldiers in "third world" nations. The Vietnam War is a good example of what I mean. But if I understand the question, I think "fair fight" is definitely not an ethical requirement, though fighting a "just war" is. To see what I mean by this distinction, consider the ethics of launching a surprise attack. Though in a clear sense this isn't "fighting fair", my view is that if the cause is just and it helps to win the war, of course do it. However, there are moral rules about how to conduct war, and, say, targeting civilians in order to reduce casualties among one's own soldiers is a violation of those rules. As long as one is fighting a just war, and conducting it justly, I don't see that the notion of fighting fair is relevant. After all, war is not a sport.

In reference to question 1655: "How come pain is in the hand, an arm distance away, but the pain processing is in the brain? I don't feel my hand in the brain, I feel it at 40cms away from my eyes, on the keyboard." I'd have thought that there might have been some consideration in the response to the location of nerves in hand. We can have cuts, say, on parts of the body that are low in nerve density and have no feeling of pain at all. Or if the nerves are severed somehow, then there is no sensation or "projection by the brain" of the pain. Is not the nervous system an extension of the brain? It's made of the same material. Pain and throbbing in the hand is then located in the hand and of course acknowledged by and registered in the cortex for any subsequent actions that may be required. Would this mean a redefinition of "brain"? Perhaps some brain processing is more "distributed" in nature and an end to the "brains in a vat" models...

In some sense of course the nervous system is an extension of the brain, and precisely where one sets the boundary of the brain is somewhat arbitrary. However there is a point to distinguishing the function of the nerves in the hand that detect the damage in question - say, a cut - from the function of higher-level centers in the cortex that process the information and mediate responses (such as grabbing the hand, putting pressure on the cut, etc.). Rather than speak of "projection of the pain" by the brain, I would describe what's going on as the brain representing damage in the hand (that's the pain - it's represented as located in the hand) based upon the inputs received from the nerves in the hand. So long as the best explanation of cognitive and perceptual activity requires describing the mind/brain in terms of distinct faculties with distinct functions - and this is of course an empirical question, but I believe there is good reason to accept it - it would only undermine the explanatory project...

To accuse someone of lying what evidence must one have? Let us assume that someone argued that Saddam Hussein had WMD. We now know that to be incorrect. What is the missing element to evidence that s/he was lying other than a personal statement from her/him to that effect?

Lying involves an intentional act of deception. If someone truly believed that Iraq before the US invasion possessed WMD and asserted as much, this wouldn't be a case of lying. We all make claims from time to time that turn out to be false, but we are not (usually - see below) morally culpable. However, it's lying if one makes a false claim believing it to be false, or at least not believing it to be true. (Of course in some circumstances one might be morally culpable for one's ignorance, or for making a claim that has serious consequences without sufficient justification. So if someone in a position of authority went around claiming that Iraq had WMD without solid evidence, even if they believed it, they would be morally blameworthy. But that doesn't mean they were lying.)

In what sense can someone come to 'own' a piece of land?

First of all, the question of what grounds private ownership applies to all goods, not just land. So I'm going to treat the question as the more general one about how one can come to own anything. There are two basic approaches to this question: a "natural rights" approach and a "social institution" approach. On the former approach, people have rights to own goods in the same sense in which they have other basic rights, such a right not to have their bodily integrity violated by others. The question for such an approach is how one acquires a property right in any particular good, which amounts to the right to exclusive use of the good and a correlative duty on the part of others to not interfere with the owner's use of the good. The most common answer to this question derives from Locke, and it divides the question into two: how does an unowned good come to be owned by someone, and how can ownership of an already-owned good be rightfully transferred. The answer to the second question is fairly...

When I look at the marvels in technology that mankind has produced in this past century I can't help but wonder: Why are we so proud of our accomplishments and in ourselves? What has mankind created that hasn't already been created in us and in nature, in an even more refined and excellent form? Is not what mankind has created on this earth a mock counterfeit of the human body? We have a governmental head that for millenniums has failed to bring peace, order and stability to the rest of the body. We have a left and right hand that cannot work together toward the same purpose such as universal peace. We have eyes that cannot focus on the the true underlying causes of all our problems. We have a mouth that cannot speak a cohesive sentence to express one unified thought. We have nerve endings that cannot sense the pain of hunger and disease that plague entire nations. We have ears that cannot listen past our religious differences to hear the unified, pleading cry for salvation. We have legs that can take us...

The question is rhetorically hyperbolic in a way that makes it hard to discern just what kind of answer you are looking for. For instance, of course we can "speak a cohesive sentence to express one unified thought"; all of us do it thousands of times per day. I grant however that human history is filled with horror, and that human beings are capable of great violence, evil, and in general a lack of empathy and sensitivity. On the other hand, there are many, many instances of selfless acts of great sacrifice out of love and duty. As for taking pride in our scientific, technological, and, yes, philosophical accomplishments, I don't see that our evident faults ought to prevent us from recognizing our evident accomplishments. Human minds are wonderful, awe-inspiring natural objects, and it seems to me that a combination of both pride and humility, in just the right proportion, is well warranted.

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