Philosophers Are Now Standing By

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By JENNIFER HOWARD

Misplaced your moral compass? Visit http://www.askphilosophers.org and you may be able to find it again — and get a refresher on the differences between Continental and analytic philosophy at the same time. More than 30 scholars stand ready to answer questions on such topics as the afterlife, adultery, ethics, and existentialism — "putting the skills and knowledge of trained philosophers at the service of the general public."

Here is one exchange:

Question: Is it wrong to eat people?

Response (from Alexander George, chairman of the philosophy department at Amherst College):

I'll go out on a limb (oops). My own view is that if one could eat a person without harming anyone, there would be nothing wrong with it. (Still, the idea disgusts me in the same way that, when I did eat meat, the idea of eating calves' brains disgusted me. But that's another matter.) The bare fact of having human flesh in one's alimentary system does not seem morally fraught to me.