Every societytries to find ways of judging whether an action is right or wrong. Some suggest that we can make rules that tell us what is good and what is bad. But others say that it is not so simple. To decide if something is morally right, it might be too simple to look just at what will happen if we do it, and whether that outcome is good or bad. Sometimes, for instance, the outcomes are all bad and you have to chose the least best of them all.
Rules or outcomes?
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here are certain rules about what is right and wrong, and usually we shouldn’t break them. But perhaps what makes something good or bad is the effect it has, not the action itself. Is it what you do, or the result of what you do that really matters? Whenever we make a decision about what is the right thing to do, perhaps we should consider how the outcome will affect other people, instead of just following the rules without questioning them.
Do the ends justify the means?
Does it matter what we do or what means we use, as long as the outcome is good in the end? We have to look at all the consequences. For example, it might be right to let one person die to save 100 lives, but wrong to kill 100 to save just one. Perhaps we need to look at people’s intentions, too. Did they do something bad because they knew
it would have good consequences, or was it just a bad thing that turned out fine in the end?
The greatest happiness
English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) believed that we can decide the morality of an action by looking at its outcome. He said that what matters is how much happiness or harm the action causes. To judge whether it is right or wrong, we have to weigh all the good and bad consequences. He argued that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”—a system that became known as utilitarianism.
Pursuing happiness
Bentham based his system on “happiness,” meaning all the things that give us pleasure, such as food, shelter, and 
doing the things we enjoy. Other philosophers said we should be free to live our lives in the pursuit of happiness, but remember that we all have different ideas of what gives us pleasure.
The harm principle
We must think about the impact of our actions on other people. English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–73) said that something is good if it gives pleasure to other people, but that it is not wrong to do things that make us happy, too. He argued that something is only wrong if it harms someone else, or stops them from doing what brings them happiness. In addition to the happiness caused by our actions, we must consider the “harm principle”— how much our actions hurt other people or interfere with their happiness.
Good or bad? The Trolley dilemma
The idea that a good action is one that brings the most happiness, inspired many others. But the measure of right versus wrong might also not be the greatest happiness, but the least pain. Is it a bad decission and are you a murderer if you have someone killed in order to save a group of friends?
An empty trolley has broken loose and is speeding out of control down a railroad track. Farther down the line, five people are tied to the tracks. The trolley will run them over. There is no way of stopping it, but there is a lever nearby. By pulling the lever you can send the trolley down a different track. However, there is one other person tied to the tracks on the other line. What do you do? If you pull the lever, you save five lives, but the other person gets run over. If you do nothing, you will let five people die. But they would be run over anyway if you hadn’t been there. On the other hand, if you pull the lever, you have deliberately made the decision to kill one 
person. Is killing someone any different from allowing someone to die? Does your thinking change when you are standing on a bridge and can save 5 people by throwing someone from the bridge in front of the trolley? You can save the 5 people who are on the track, but the man you push will die. Should you push him? Would pushing him off the bridge be different from pulling the lever? What if he is the person who put the people on the tracks in the first place—would that affect your decision?
The hot air balloon trip
Suppose you are in a group of people riding in a hot-air balloon. It beomes clear that the balloon is too heavy, and you begin slowly falling toward the sea. The sea is full of hungry sharks. To make the balloon lighter, you need to get rid of one of the passengers. One person must be thrown to the sharks to save everyone else. But how do you choose who to throw out? It might be a good idea to choose the heaviest. Or do you choose the oldest? Perhaps one of the passengers is a doctor, and another a criminal. Would that affect your decision? Is one person more valuable than another? Would you jump yourself to let the other passengers live?
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Some philosophers say that when we talk about “nothing,” we are not really talking about a lack of anything at all. We are talking about “something,” but something other than what we were looking for. For instance, if we were to say that “Jane is not tall,” it does not mean Jane has no tallness, or no height. It just means that Jane is something other than tall. She may be short or of average height. Similarly, when we use the word “nothing” it is wrong to think that the word refers to a total vacuum.
Probability looks at how likely something is. For example, children go to school five days of the week when school is in session, and on just two days a week they do not go to school. If someone were to stick a pin in a calendar showing the school year, they would be more likely to hit a school day than a weekend. In the same way, Nozick said, it’s
Parmenides believed that things don’t just burst into existence. He said it is impossible for “things that are not” to suddenly become “things that are.” Nothing can come from nothing. He also said that it doesn’t make sense even to think of nothing, because we can’t imagine nothing. If nothingness is impossible then there must be something.
Aristotle also believed nothingness was impossible, and he used scientific reasons to support his argument. He said that the speed with which something moves through a medium—such as water—depends on how dense it is. But nothingness would have no density, so things would move infinitely fast, which is impossible
your grandparents, and so on. Aristotle thought that there must be something at the beginning of the whole human chain, and even the universe itself, that was not caused by anything else. He believed this “first cause” was God.
In philosophy, questions about what exists are grouped together under the term “metaphysics.” The word means “after physics” because one of Aristotle’s early works about physics sparked debates about existence. Today, we think of it as all the kinds of things that go beyond or above the physical and that can’t be answered by physics. Questions such as “Why is there something rather than nothing? So, why is there, what do you think?
Plenty of later philosophers disagreed with Plato’s ideas about reality. They didn’t believe we need perfect forms to explain how we know things, and they suggested instead that our minds gather information. Take an apple, for
When we see, hear, or touch something, we form an idea of what it is. So when we feel something fluffy and see brownness and big ears, we might decide this adds up to the idea of a “rabbit.” “Rabbit” is a human word and idea. But if “rabbit” is just an idea in your head, what do you really know? You know you have an idea, but do you really have a rabbit? And what happens if no one is around to have the idea—is there still a rabbit?
The suggestion that only ideas are real is known as “idealism.” It can seem very odd to ask yourself how you know something—say, a table— is there in front of you. Your senses give you information about it: it’s hard, wooden, has legs, and so on. But to figure out that this object is a table you have to use reason. Try altering some of the information. If the table moved, all by itself, would you change your mind about what it is? Magicians take advantage of our ideas about what is real to perform their tricks. They say, “See this? And this? But now watch— nothing is as you thought!”
Perhaps, as the idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant suggested, there are real things in the world outside our minds. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing what they actually are. All we know about things comes from what we sense about them. But what if you had 10 different senses instead of just five? What would the world seem like to you then?
Whether it is spoken or written, language lets us communicate ideas to other people. We can discuss things, agree or disagree with other people’s ideas, and come up with new ideas of our own. We use language to communicate with ourselves, too— having a kind of “inner conversation” where we discuss ideas with ourselves in our minds.
There are some things that we can think about without using language. For example, when we imagine a machine and how it works, we usually think visually, in pictures. Pictures are often more useful than language to think about things we can see or touch. But pictures cannot communicate abstract ideas such as goodness or fairness. It is difficult to express a complex idea, such as “Jim won’t come if it is raining,” in a picture. To think about these more complex things, we need language.
People who have been deaf from birth learn language differently than people who can hear. They cannot easily learn
Philosopher and psychologist Noam Chomsky (1928–) says that humans are born with a unique natural ability to learn language. He has pointed out that a kitten exposed to exactly the same language and environment as a baby would never pick up language in the way the baby would—learning language is uniquely human.
We might have our instinct telling us simple things and warning us to stay or get our of trouble. But to think about complicated things we seem to need language. How do you use language?
Imagine that you see someone walk up to a store, find it closed, frown, and walk away. Based on your own experience, you might assume that the person felt frustrated. However, that person’s mind and body might operate very differently from yours. Perhaps that person frowns when thinking hard, and therefore may not be annoyed at all. 
German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said that we have developed language to help us share our experiences with other people. Language lets us make our private thoughts public, and we can only talk if we understand what is being said. So language proves that there are other minds, because it represents shared thoughts—things that lots of us think or feel. Without language we wouldn’t know that we think and feel in similar ways.
Even if you explain to your best friend exactly what happens when you stub your toe, can he or she really know what it is like toexperience that in your body and mind? It’s possible that if you asked 10 other people to describe the feeling of stubbing their toe, they would all use the word “pain,” but they could all be feeling it differently. How can we know exactly what they are feeling?
similar enough. 
said that we might not be aware of having these ideas, but they are like rules that we use to make sense of the world. They include mathematical ideas such as shapes and sizes. Without these ideas, Descartes said, the world would seem like a big, colorful, energetic mess that made no sense at all.
One of the ideas that Descartes said is we are born with is “cause and effect.” For example, when a baby hits a mobile and it moves, what makes him hit it again? Descartes would say it is because the baby already understands the idea of cause and effect, so he knows that the force of his hand will make the mobile move. But John Locke said this was wrong. He said that a baby has no ideas, but is able to work things out. So he would say that the baby just happens to hit the mobile again, and again, and starts to notice that the hand and mobile movement seem connected.
To support his argument that all our ideas are learned through experience, Locke reasoned that if we were born with ideas already in our heads then we would know about them. Because we don’t know about these ideas, then they can’t be there. However, other philosophers say that Locke could be wrong about this. They argue that we don’t know every single one of our memories, until we try to remember them. For example, you might have forgotten what you did last weekend, until someone asks you about it. 
Perhaps the ideas we are born with are just like our memories— in our minds already, just waiting to be found? What do you think?