I wonder whether there isn’t a bit more to your worry that there issomething immoral involved if you were to visit your mother despite thefact that you really didn’t want to or if you were to give free Frenchlessons to an acquaintance whose company you didn’t enjoy. To explore this idea, I’d like to step back and focus on a presupposition behind your question– namely, that you do have a moral duty to your unpleasant acquaintance to talk French to himfor an hour each week and that you do have a moral duty to visit yourmother despite your disinclination to do so. Do you really have theseduties? Surely you don’t have a general duty to speak French for anhour a week to just anyone who asks for the favor, and surely you don’thave a duty to visit for the holidays just anyone who wants you to. Sowhy should an acquaintance or your mother have any special claims onyour time, company, and conversation? Let’s begin with yourmother. Like most mothers, I’ll assume, she’s done a lot for you. Sheprovided...

When I first read our interlocutor’s question, I too was tempted torespond that mothers have no choice but to influence their children’svalues and beliefs. Every action, statement, and gesture of a belovedand respected parent signifies to young children who are desperate tomake sense of their world what it is reasonable to believe and how itis reasonable to act. Such signals in early childhood provide theultimate basis for what most children could even understand as a reasonfor action or belief during more sophisticated philosophical musingswith their parents when they are teenagers. To this extent, I think, itis impossible for children ever to gain complete cognitive independenceand distance from their parents, and for this reason and many others,the responsibility of parents often feels overwhelming. But, ona second reading, I was struck by her description of herself as “afresh mother of a teenage kid”. I’m also a mother of a teenage daughterand I hardly feel fresh. I wonder whether our interlocutor...

Indebted to T.H. Irwin ( Aristotle's First Principles ), I would put Aristotle’s point about friendship slightly differently —not that genuine friendship involves constancy, but that the best sort of friendship involves constancy. On Aristotle's view, friendship has atleast two features that lead to this result. Friends care about eachother for their own sake (1155b31-2, 1166a3-7), and friends wish tolive together (1157b19-24, 1166a7-9). I can’t care about another personfor her own sake if she has no stable character to be concerned with.And if her character is constantly changing, then we can make norational plans together about how we should live our lives togethersince I can’t share my life with another person if her ends aredifferent from my own or if we take pleasure and pain in differentthings (1157b22-4; 1165b23-7). But if I can’t make rational plans withmy friend, then my friendship will have limited value for me in my ownproject of self...

All Utilitarians share the view that we ought to assess the morality of actions in terms of how they affect the well-being of those whom they affect. They often differ in their conception of well-being. Some regard well-being as a matter of pleasure and the absence of pain; others have different conceptions of well-being. I don’t know of any philosopher who has suggested that happiness is simply a matter of satisfying whatever desires we might happen to have. (Callicles appears to endorse this view in Plato’s Gorgias ; but Plato makes clear that Callicles was not a philosopher.) Instead, the only desire-satisfaction accounts that have any serious defenders are accounts that put certain constraints on the desires the satisfaction of which would constitute well-being. In the end, I don’t think that any version of this sort of account is viable, but I also don’t believe that such accounts can be easily dismissed. For able defenses of informed desire-satisfaction accounts of well-being, see...

I haven’t given much thought to the ethics of sex between humans and non-humans, but it seems to me that the fact that sex between humans requires consent does not imply that sex involving non-human animals requires consent. We require consent in sexual relations between human beings because we believe that making informed choices about intimate relationships is a significant good for human beings. Such choices cannot be part of a good life for non-human animals because such animals are permanently incapable of making them. That’s not to say that non-human animals are to be used as one pleases; it’s simply to say that whether consent occurs or does not occur cannot be a relevant consideration.

I think that you’re absolutely right– if a significant amount of thepleasure that we achieve from watching sports is “the experience ofhigh levels of skill and human achievement,” then anything that raisesthe levels of such skill and achievement, including enhancement drugs,should improve the quality of our experience. But in fact, it seems notto work that way. When we watch a gifted athlete perform an action ofextraordinary grace and prowess, we marvel at the act and at the veryexistence of a person who could perform such an act, and we feelpleasure. But when we learn that his heightened skills were due toperformance-enhancing drugs, we are no longer so impressed; in fact,many of us feel disappointed. There’s nothing special about thisathlete, we reason, since anyone who took these drugs might haveperformed just as well. All of this suggests that part of the source ofour pleasure in watching sports is not simply experiencing “high levelsof skill and human achievement,” but rather experiencing high levels...

You might also want to look at Martha Nussbaum's "Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach," in Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, eds., The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

It seems to me that to call an action selfish is to imply (1) that the agent was motivated solely or primarily by considerations of personal self-interest and (2) the action is contrary to the significant interests of others. (I add this second condition because I don’t think that we would be inclined to call a person selfish if, say, he worked on a crossword puzzle simply because he enjoyed the activity and the only harm that he caused to others was the distaste his friends felt at the thought of his indulgence in this activity.) I can see why it might be contrary to the interests of a political party for an MP to vote against the party line, but it doesn’t follow that the MP’s action was selfish. If, for example, the MP opposed the party primarily because she believed that the party line was contrary to the interests of the citizens of Britain, then her vote would not be selfish because her act would not be motivated solely or even primarily by considerations of self-interest. In fact, she...

Now, now, Alan, don’t you think you’re being a bit hard on Thomas? I dothink that many people feel duty bound to reveal every wayward thoughtto their partners, even when they know that their partners would prefernot to know (I’m with Thomas– I would prefer not to have suchknowledge, thank you very much) and even when they know that therelationship and those in it would suffer from such a revelation(again, speaking only personally, while I know that it would notreflect badly on me to learn that my partner fantasizes about sex withsomeone else [after all, doesn’t everyone, no matter how stellar therelationship, think about sex with someone else?], I’m not sure that Iwould be so mature and rational as to not drive myself [and my partner]crazy by getting fixated on the particularities of the fantasy. Whyher? What does she have that I don’t have? And so on.). So what couldthe possible basis for the duty to disclose be, I take Thomas to beasking, if not considerations of autonomy and happiness? For...

This might be a question that is best answered by professional psychologists rather than philosophers, but it does raise interesting questions about the nature of love. Several philosophers (e.g., Solomon, Scruton, Nozick) have suggested that when one person loves another, the lover’s sense of her own identity becomes merged with that of the beloved. The fact that a loss of a beloved evokes a feeling in the lover that is naturally described as “emptiness” seems to support this idea. Not only is the beloved no longer there; a part of the lover is no longer there. There is a hole in the identity of the lover, until the lover reconstructs her identity around other things that she loves or comes to love.