That depends on exactly what he was apologizing for, and what he meant when he said he didn't regret the action. I'm sure that he was genuinely sorry that his action caused embarrassment and shame to France. That is quite consistent with believing that he was justified in his action, and that he would do it again in similar circumstances. That is probably what he meant by saying that he didn't regret the action. Of course, he might just have been inconsistent. There was an enormous amount of pressure on him to apologize. I suspect that most public apologies are insincere.

Repecting a right and respecting what one does with a right are completely different. Consider the right to free speech. I can consistently respect that right but abhor someone's particular exercise of it, say to deny the holocaust or global warming.

There are different versions of Utilitarianism. Some judge actions by their actual consequences, others by their foreseeable, or expected consequences. All judge actions in comparison with alternative possible actions. I doubt that the act of giving birth had any possible alternatives. However, you could just as easily ask your question about the act of conception, or rather the sex that led to the conception. Utilitarians who judge actions by their foreseeable consequences would not judge the conception of a serial killer to have been wrong, unless it could somehow have been foreseen that the resultant person would be a serial killer. Utilitarians who judge actions by their actual consequences might well say that the conception was wrong, but they would add that it was not blameworthy. Utilitarians, and consequentialists generally, distinguish between the morality of an action and the character of an agent. It is perfectly possible for a good or right action to reflect badly on the agent, or for a bad...

The main reason we could give to deny the existence of life after death is that we have no good evidence for its existence. The question of when an absence of evidence for the existence of something is a (good) reason to deny its existence is complicated. But consider the existence of the Easter Bunny, or of an undetectable pink elephant in your bedroom.

I agree with Richard that Thomson's analogy doesn't apply to the AIDS victims, as opposed to the virus. I wanted to add something about the reliability of thought experiments in general, though. Philosophers like Thomson (and Kamm) employ imaginary examples in a quasi scientific manner. The example, or rather a consideration of the example, is like an experiment. Our intuitive reactions to the examples are the results of the experiment--the data. We are then supposed to construct moral theories that fit the data. The problem is that our moral intuitions are influenced by all kinds of factors, including ones that those same moral intuitions tell us are morally irrelevant. A pretty good examination of this problem is contained in Peter Unger's excellent (but slightly annoyingly written) book Living High and Letting Die . This doesn't mean that we should abandon imaginary examples altogether. They can serve as a pretty good consistency check on a position, for example. But we certainly shouldn't...