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The Bachelor's Argument against marriage states that marriage involves an imprudent risk of finding oneself committed to a relationship with someone one does not love. The evidence indicates that many people who marry eventually find themselves without the feelings for the other person, which make a marital relationship seem worthwhile in the first place, and it seems to be highly undesirable to be locked into a relationship wianlth one's spouse.

Debates about libertarianism and redistribution often revolve around self-ownership. There are two main reasons for this: first, self-ownership is often featured in Lockean accounts of property that endow us with a claim to the resources that are up for redistribution. Second, self-ownership has sometimes been mustered as a way of resisting the additional labor that is said to be required by redistributive schemes. In this essay, I argue that these appeals to self-ownership are misguided. However, unlike most critics of these appeals, I don't wish to claim that redistribution is therefore vindicated. On the contrary, my main goal is to show that there are alternatives to invoking self-ownership that are more effective and that better capture the core intuition behind libertarian objections to redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bachelor's Argument states that marriage involves creating a state of affairs in which one may find oneself marriage to someone in the absence of mutual love, and that since this is foreseeable and highly undesirable, marriage is, for most, a mistake. The various arguments against marriage and the feelings associated with marriage are reviewed.

Following Locke, philosophical discussion of private property has tended to focus on the acquisition of natural resources as central. In this paper I first pursue the idea that the resource paradigm doesn't apply to most developed economies, and show how this creates problems for many accounts of property. My second ambition is to draw a normative conclusion by showing that redistribution of wealth generated in the context of services is more difficult to justify compared with the natural resource paradigm philosophers have often focused on. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a simple argument against life being the product of design. The argument rests on three points. (1) We can conceive of the debate in terms of likelihoods, in the technical sense – how probable the design hypothesis renders our evidence, versus how probable the competing Darwinian hypothesis renders that evidence. (2) God, as traditionally conceived, had many more options by which to bring about life as we observe it than were available to natural selection. That is, the relevant parameters were, in many cases, far more constrained under natural selection. (3) Utterly mundane features of the world, like that the earth is very old, are actually powerful evidence that the world was not designed, since that outcome was optional on the design hypothesis but nearly inevitable on natural selection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Illustrates the asymmetrical attitudes toward future and past pains and pleasures by means of a thought experiment described by Derek Parfit. Consideration of the attitude toward painful and pleasant experiences; Reasons for the relief of past pain; Unbearability of the neutral pattern of concern.