Thank you, Max Palmer, for a great question! There is a famous nightmare that was had by one of Freud’s patients and that was subsequently interpreted by a French psychoanalyst, Lacan, and more recently by the popular Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. The patient had this nightmare after falling asleep beside the coffin of his little […]
We have nightmares. Can we have daymares? Read More
Thank you, Robin Pickering, for a great question! Hopefully this helps… This question seems to have three major dimensions. The first is mainly about what would happen if you went back in time regardless of your wrongdoing. The second is about how we define your responsibility for your wrongdoing – what we need in order
Thank you, Elle Flinn-Shephard, for such a dilemma! This question touches many important ethical issues. It looks a lot like the famous trolley problem: Imagine that you are the driver of a runaway train. Up ahead you see 5 people tied to the track. If you do nothing, the train will kill them all. But
Thank you, Angus Nimmo, for such a productive question! Philosophers like questioning questions as a start, and this might well be a helpful method here. Why think that it is wrong not to have children? One answer, perhaps familiar from social pressure, would be to see parenting as a life accomplishment. But, for someone who
Is it wrong to be child-free by choice? Read More
Thank you, Robin Pickering, for such a great question! Many philosophers have cracked their heads open trying to answer this one, so I’ll try to do my best here. A thought experiment will show all the complexities and interesting elements of this problem. Suppose that in the future you can go to work on Mars
If I got myself cloned, would my identity still be my own? Read More
Thank you, Jesal Panchal, for such an important question! As humans we always tend to look at the things that surround us as if they are humans too. As humans, we often (consciously or not) hurt one another, but can objects, on their own, hurt us too? A glass of wine never hurt anyone, right?
Why do the things we love – wine, for instance – hurt us the most? Read More
Thank you, James Cleaver, for a killer question! The simple answer is that they do both: guns protect people and guns kill people; or perhaps it is more accurate to say that guns are used to protect people and guns are used to kill people. The more interesting cases arise when the two coincide, that
Do guns protect people or kill people? Read More
Thank you, Ramón Mansilla, for a great question! Let’s hope ignorance isn’t bliss, because here comes some knowledge… If someone were to call you ‘ignorant’, then you would usually take it as an insult – that is, if we regard ourselves rational agents who are epistemically responsible and see ignorance as a bad thing. By
Is ignorance really bliss? Read More
Thank you, Allan Getliff, for such a paradoxical question! There is an implication here that scary movies are somehow a bad thing – that being scared is a bad thing. That notion makes us question why we should enjoy something that is bad. As an avowed horror fan, I have considered this before, and have
Why do we enjoy watching scary movies? Read More
Thank you, Angus Nimmo, for a great question! I only hope that your assumption that we can provide an answer is well founded… An assumption can be offensive precisely because it is an assumption. If you assume something about someone, it’s because you do not know whether what you are assuming is correct. Though your
Are assumptions offensive if they are correct? Read More
