My daughter Rachel, who is now 12, used to watch the Rugrats--she was, maybe, 6 at the time. Often she asked me, "Daddy, why is Angelica so mean?" All I could muster, back then, was something about how difficult a question that was to answer. But we went back to the question as she got older. I began with the distinction between reasons and causes, and suggested to her that we could ask "why?" in two different senses. Eventually I blamed Angelica's parents: a wimpy dad who gave her everything she asked for; a superaggressive, selfish, self-absorbed, absent mother. (I can hear Ray's mother, Marie Romano, exclaiming: "It's always the mother!") The genesis of evil (and of good) is a question philosophers and other scholars have grappled with for a very long time, going back at least to Socrates and Plato. Angelica has her share of Original Sin. Blame Eve. Due to Natural Selection, humans are by nature egoists--the selfish gene writ large. Bad people are really only ignorant; if they knew more, or knew...

You write: "Alas, to say 'Iwould like to get to know you' means 'I want to spend the rest of mylife with you' ... Or does it?" Consider this variation: Alas, to betold "I want to get to know you" is to be told "You don't stand achance with me."

Fifty First Dates (Drew Barrimore, Adam Sandler) is a sour-funny treatment of loss of memory. After an automobile accident, she can remember only what happens during the course of one day. She begins again (from the point of the accident) when she wakes up the next morning. In a hospital scene, the audience is shown the case of a man whose memory extends only ten seconds. He asks over and over again how you are and wishes you a good day endlessly. A hilarious scene about something tragic. But he doesn't have a clue about his "sad" state. Might we drink to forget? Might we forget things if we smoke too much marijuana? The difference between short-term and long-term memory is important. I do remember what I ate this morning (nothing! my daily routine); what I ate on March 4, 1955 is gone. The older I get, other people claim that my long-term memory is starting to fail. But I know they are wrong, the fools. Since I am supposed to be the sex expert among the panelists (ha), I might as well say a...

Your intelligent questions are disturbing and difficult ones, both theoretically and practically. I'd like to proceed by dividing your message into pieces. (I) "Say I'm in a romantic relationship and I'm trying to decide whether I'd be happier remaining in it, or leaving it [period]." Many people ask themselves whether the relationship they are in makes them as happy (or content, or satisfied) as they could be. The question often arises because the person we are with is human, has failings, does annoying things--is not perfect (naturally), at least from our perspective. Relationships come with tensions, and baggage, and problems, and we wonder whether the bad side and parts are offset by the good side and parts. (Despite the powerfully romantic vision of much music [Whitney Houston's song, for one], there are very few perfectly matched couples. And, as Iris Murdoch once wrote [ The Black Prince ], even the outwardly-appearing best of marriages has its secrets. "Marriage is a very private...

You write both: "This area belongs to me" and "I am not a bossy person who believes he owns his girlfriend." There's no contradiction if (1) you meant the first as a joke [even if a suspicious one], or if (2) one can own another's genitals yet not own the (whole) person. Kant thought not, but his sexual metaphysics are odd. We might put the problem this way, as a conflict between Roger Scruton ( Sexual Desire ), a sexual conservative, and Betty Dodson, the guru of female masturbation-as-liberation. Scruton thinks that any woman who plays with herself (be it digitally or mechanically) while with her man (her husband, ideally), commits an obscene display that destroys the unitive meaning of the sexual act--even if (if I read him properly) the woman's engaging in some digitalizing helps them achieve orgasm together or nearly together (unification). Scruton doesn't consider that some men might get turned on watching their companions fool around with themselves down there. Or if he would, the men,...

Why is stupidity not painful? Huh? It is painful. Every time I do something stupid, I feel the searing pain, I wince like a dog hit by a car. Really. This is supposed to help me not do stupid things, like putting my hand in the flame. Doesn't work much, does it? We continue to do stupid things and feel the pain. So much the worse for both Intelligent Design and Natural Selection.

A few, but only a few, words on two 19th-century philosophers: Jeremy Bentham and his disciple, who went off in his own, individual direction, John Stuart Mill. Both were utilitarians, and believed in the moral principle: "the greatest happiness for the greatest number." But they understood "happiness" differently. Bentham took it hedonistically: happiness (the good, the summum bonum ) is pleasure. Sexual pleasure is a paradigm of the good in this sense: exquisite and exhilarating sensations. There are others: eating, sleeping, playing sports--all fun things. Mill thought that there were lower and higher pleasures: bodily, sensual pleasures, and the pleasures of the mind. These include, for example, reading a poem and enjoying its beauty. For Bentham, "pushpin is as good as poetry," that poetry was good only when and because it could produce sensations similar in kind to the bodily. Not so for Mill, who thought that these pleasures were qualitatively different (and only those who experienced both...

Professor Gentzler's "You should not believe me unless I offer you, or you have independent access to, compelling reasons to do so" seems cynical. Why not, instead, the more sociable and cheerful, "You should believe me unless I offer you, or you have independent access to, compelling reasons not to do so"? Should we assume others are fundamentally liars (even about whether they are liars) or fundamentally truth-tellers. I suppose it depends on the context. Some of us are experts at knowing when to believe others, unless there is good reason not to, and when not to believe others, unless there is good reason to. But some of us lack this skill. Then we are either gullible, being too sociable, cheerful, foolish; or we are paranoid, not trusting anyone, not even our own mothers.

I have but five things, now, to say in reply to this question. (1) Might you post several of the questions that you can think of that are not questions of sexual ethics and seem to you to be anthropological or psychological, not philosophical? Maybe I could show how they are, after all, philosophical, or could be approached philosophically as well as anthropologically, etc. (2) Here is a philosophical task for you: please define "sexual act" for me. I do not mean describe it ("it feels sooooo good"); I mean provide what some philosophers call an "analysis." What is it about sexual acts that make them sexual and that distinguish them from other kinds of acts? This task is not as easy as you might think (and it has practical import; recall Clinton and Lewinsky). (3) Might I suggest that the philosophy of sex deals with ontological, metaphysical, conceptual, historical/textual, and normative (ethical and nonethical) matters? If so, sexual ethics might be a rather small part of the terrain. (4) For a...

Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt thinks that "the loving concern of parents for their infants or small children is the mode of caring that comes closest . . . to providing pure instances of what I have in mind in speaking of love" (from his essay "On Caring," p. 166)---as opposed, in particular, to romantic and sexual loves. In his book The Reasons of Love , he similarly writes: "Among relationships between humans, the love of parents for their infants or small children is the species of caring that comes closest to offering recognizably pure instances of love" (p. 43; see p. 82). So, what is love for Frankfurt? In Frankfurt's account of love, there are four "conceptually necessary features" ( Reasons , pp. 79-80). First , love is "disinterested concern for the well-being or flourishing of the person who is loved." "Disinterested" means "unmotivated by any instrumental concern." Second , love is "ineluctably personal," that is, "[t]he person who is loved is loved for himself or...