philosophical questions

A good philosophical question is one Google can't answer. These aren't fake "deep" questions; each comes from a real philosophical debate: the Gettier problem, moral luck, consent to the social contract, the hard problem of consciousness.

Pick a question and argue it alone for 10 minutes: give an answer first, then object to your own answer. That's the Socratic method philosophy departments use, and it works solo.

pull a philosophical question

• The decision you are making right now may have started as chemistry in your brain a fraction of a second before you became aware of it. So when you say 'I decided', are you really just the audience for a decision that was already made?
• In an orchestra, the music is not in any single note; it lives in the relationships between them. Maybe 'you' are not in any single part of your brain either, but in the melody the parts play together. So when the melody stops and the instruments fall silent, where are you?
• The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
• A person who never exists suffers nothing and loses nothing. So is bringing someone into the world exposing them to every possible pain without their consent? Is being born really a gift, or a choice made for someone who could never be asked?
• Let him who would move the world first move himself.
• There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.
• There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
• Wittgenstein's beetle: everyone has a box containing something they call a 'beetle', but nobody can look inside anyone else's box. When we use the same word for inner feelings like pain, are we really talking about the same thing?
• Do we have free will, or is it an illusion we cannot live without?
• Virtue ethics: does asking 'what kind of person should I be' capture morality better than 'what should I do'? Is it rules that make us good, or character?
• The doctrine of double effect: is intending a bad outcome different from foreseeing and accepting it? If a drug given to ease a patient's pain hastens their death, does intention make the act legitimate?
• The past no longer exists, the future does not exist yet, and the present is an instant too short to measure. If no part of time actually exists, how do we manage to feel that we live inside it?
• The unexamined life is not worth living.
• The Chinese room: a person who speaks no Chinese sits in a room matching Chinese symbols according to a rulebook, producing flawless answers. Do they understand Chinese? Is producing the right output ever the same thing as understanding?
• Acts and omissions: is there a moral difference between doing harm and failing to prevent it? Should pushing someone carry the same weight as watching them fall?
• The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
• Moore's naturalistic fallacy: is it a mistake to reduce 'good' to pleasure or to what is natural? If 'good' cannot be fully defined by anything else, how do we know it?
• Mutineers on a ship each think 'my one blow won't sink it', and together they sink the ship. If no single person is to blame, who is responsible for the sinking? How does individual innocence add up to collective disaster?
• The grandfather paradox: travel back in time and stop your own grandfather from ever meeting your grandmother, and you are never born; but if you are never born, you cannot go back to stop him. Does this logical loop make time travel impossible from the start?
• The fool pursues the pleasures of life and finds himself their dupe; the wise man avoids its evils.
• Heraclitus says you cannot step into the same river twice, because the water has flowed on. But think again: is it only the river that changes, or is the person stepping in also someone new? Can anyone step into any river even once?
• The odds of you existing were practically zero; you happened only through countless accidents stacking up just right. Given such an impossible stroke of luck, is living an ordinary life a waste of the universe's gift, or is even thinking that way an empty vanity?
• Hilbert's infinite hotel: a hotel with infinitely many rooms is completely full, yet a new guest can still be given a room. Why does our common sense collapse the moment 'full' and 'infinite' appear in the same sentence?
• Newcomb's paradox: a being that predicts the future almost perfectly sets out two boxes. Take only the closed box and it is full; take both and it is empty. Logic says take both boxes, so why does intuition keep telling us to take just one?
• Every night when you fall asleep your consciousness switches off completely, and every morning it comes back. Is the person who wakes up really the one who fell asleep, or a brand new consciousness that inherited their memories? What exactly separates sleep from death?
• The body is the tomb of the soul.
• The surprise execution paradox: a prisoner is told he will be hanged one day next week, but he will never know which day in advance. By pure logic he proves that no day is possible, and is then hanged, completely surprised, on Wednesday. Where did the reasoning go wrong?
• Thomson's violinist: you wake up with a famous violinist plugged into your body, and only nine months of your life can keep him alive. Does someone's survival give them a right to use your body?
• The ethics of care: should morality be grounded in abstract rules, or in concrete relationships and compassion? Could the bonds we feel for one another explain morality better than the scales of justice?
• Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
• Would life still have value if suffering were engineered away?
• Why do some of the kindest, most honest people struggle in life while people who lie and cheat seem to thrive?
• What is tradition? A higher authority which one obeys, not because it commands what is useful to us, but because it commands.
• How many things I can do without!
• Is morality objective, or something humans invented?
• God is dead; God died of his pity for man.
• A happy life is impossible; the best that a man can attain is a heroic life.
• Societies will spend millions rescuing a few stranded adventurers, yet do nothing for individuals quietly ruined by bad luck. What does that say about how we value lives?
• How much did this people have to suffer to be able to become so beautiful!
• If the world were clear, art would not exist.
• We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
• Compatibilism: can determinism and freedom both be true? If I act on my own desires without coercion, am I free even inside a chain of causes?
• Has philosophy ever definitively settled a question?
• Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
• Nagel's bat: can we ever know what it is like to be a bat? If another creature's inner world is closed to us forever, why can't science unlock subjectivity?
• What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?
• A hundred years after a person dies, nobody is left who remembers them. It is as if they never lived. If a life's meaning depends on the people who remember it, and we know that eventually no one will be left in the universe, was everything meaningless from the start?
• Diffusion of responsibility: why does nobody in a crowd step in to help, with everyone assuming someone else will? Why does individual conscience weaken as responsibility gets spread across more people?
• What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world!
• Diogenes living in a barrel and telling Alexander the Great to stop blocking his sunlight: what Cynic philosophy asks of us.
• The Zen idea of beginner's mind points at a paradox: the more you know about a subject, the more your mind closes to new learning. How can experts stay open?
• One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.
• The Stoic divide between what is up to us and what is not, and where inner peace really comes from.
• The plank of Carneades: two shipwrecked sailors cling to a plank that can hold only one. If one pushes the other off to save himself, is it murder or self-defense? Does the instinct to survive suspend morality?
• Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know.
• We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.
• Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.
• Moral luck: can we be blamed for outcomes beyond our control? Is it fair to judge the drunk driver who crashes differently from the one who makes it home safely, when their intentions were exactly the same?
• When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them.
• The future you will have completely different desires and values from the you of today. So the promises you make and the things you save up are really for a stranger you have never met. Why do you owe them anything?
• One writer argued that the point of art is the process of struggling, not the final product. If a machine produces something indistinguishable from art, does how it was made still matter?
• The child in the basement: if the happiness of thousands depended on the constant suffering of a single child, would you accept that happiness? Can the misery of one innocent ever legitimize the wellbeing of a whole society?
• Moral luck: you can do everything right and things can still go wrong. How should you judge people, and yourself, in a world like that?
• The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.
• Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
• Most disagreements are two people arguing from different frames without noticing it.
• Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.
• Moral relativism: do right and wrong change from culture to culture, or is there a universal standard? When what is normal in one society is horrifying in another, who is right?
• Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
• The best way to disagree is to take on your opponent's strongest argument, not their weakest. Why has public discourse gone in exactly the opposite direction?
• The sorites paradox: take grains away from a heap of sand one at a time, and at which grain does it stop being a heap? If no single grain makes the difference, does the fuzziness of that boundary mean our concepts themselves are broken?
• Children who are taught philosophy improve at math, reading, and empathy. Why is philosophy still missing from most schools?
• Health is not everything, but without health everything is nothing.
• What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
• A single idea can change the course of a life. Which ideas have that power?
• True, profound peace of heart and complete tranquillity of soul are to be found only in solitude.
• Nobody expects atoms or molecules to have a purpose, so why do we expect life to have one? Maybe living things are not for anything, they just are.
• A death row inmate with dementia cannot remember his crime. Is he still the same person who committed it, and is he still responsible?
• We may never be able to tell whether an AI has become conscious. What should we do with that uncertainty?
• Everything is content, once you start filming your life, the act of filming changes what your life is.
• To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.
• The zombie argument: could there be a being that behaves exactly like you from the outside but has no feelings, no inner experience at all? And if such a being is possible, does that mean consciousness is something over and above the physical body?
• When a community says 'we', who exactly does it mean? Its members change, its rules change, its home changes, yet we still call it the same community. What is the invisible thing that keeps a nation, a team, or a family the same over time, or is it just a name?
• Deontology: can an action be wrong in itself, regardless of its consequences? Even if a lie saves a life, why is the lie itself still counted as wrong?
• Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.
• Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise: swift Achilles can never catch the tortoise that started ahead, because by the time he reaches where it was, it has moved a little further. Do infinite steps make motion logically impossible, or is it logic that fails to capture reality?
• A baby has no memories of its earliest days, yet we say that baby was you. If an illness erased all your memories, would you still be the same person? Is it your memories that make you you, your body, or something else entirely?
• Why should one tell the truth if it's to one's advantage to tell a lie?
• The ring of Gyges: if you were invisible and certain of never being punished, would you still be honest? Is morality just fear of getting caught, or something deeper?
• Machiavelli warned 500 years ago that publics grow complacent in the face of charismatic, self-interested leaders. Are we proving him right?
• You think you understand something, until you try to explain it to someone else and realize you never did. Maybe knowing is not something in your head but something that only exists once it is put into words. So do you really know anything you cannot explain?
• Most equations in physics make no distinction between past and future; both directions work equally well. So what makes time flow only forward, why can we never go back, or is the 'flow' just something our brains invented?
• All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.
• You did not choose where you were born, your family, your language, or your first beliefs, and every choice you have made since was built on top of them. If you never chose your starting point, are your decisions truly free, or just a line of falling dominoes?
• How should you decide which problems are worth your lifetime?
• Buridan's ass: a donkey standing exactly halfway between two identical bales of hay cannot decide which one to choose and starves to death. Does perfect equality really paralyze free will and make decision impossible?
• Some thinkers call industrial farming one of the worst crimes in history, with billions of sentient animals living and dying on production lines. Why is this so easy for most of us to ignore?
• Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
• Mary's room: a scientist who knows everything about color but has never seen it finally sees red. Does she learn something new? Is experience a separate thing added on top of factual knowledge?
• If a hot dog is a sandwich then cereal is soup. Are categories about structure or about use, and does it matter which one we pick?