Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm a subjectivist about morality.
Attitudes are changing very quickly.
Our differences should not be exaggerated.
We live on a restless planet in a violent universe.
Acts are right in virtue of the goodness of their consequences.
The seas will continue to rise no matter who gets elected president.
We need more science, but what we especially need is science fiction.
You can't imagine anything like nature as we know it without predators.
One of the real dangers of our time is people's indifference to history.
I begin with human psychology and then see what we can say about ethics.
Ethics is prescriptive and can change behavior, but usually only at the margins.
We're highly adaptable and have developed some powerful systems of representation.
Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased.
Climate change involves fundamental choices about how we want to live and what kind of world we want.
Apocalypses don't happen very often. They tend to be separated by tens or even hundreds of millions of years.
On my reading of history people who want to bring us the best are usually the people we ought to be afraid of.
We can use economic instruments to help realize our goals but economics does not tell us what our goals should be.
It's true that climate change is an unprecedented problem so it's not surprising that it's so difficult to address.
In much of the world today there are no more chilling words than "I'm from the United States and I'm here to help you."
The Enlightenment is not a nightmare, nor is it something that comes easily to us. It is an aspiration - and a good one!
Increasingly both environmentalists and animal ethicists recognize the enormous destruction caused by animal agriculture.
Ethical systems are fundamentally conservative and primarily directed towards regulating interactions within communities.
Every country now has its own domestic political debate about how to respond to climate change. This is where the action is.
Even if Bill McKibben were to become dictator, future generations would suffer because of the carbon we had already emitted.
The problem is that the Enlightenment dream may make too many demands on poor African apes like us. We may just not be up to it.
Philosophers are often actively disinterested in what happens between the cup and the lips (after all, that's "non-ideal theory").
Since we're not very good at something as basic as controlling our reproduction, life is really bad for more people than ever before.
In this era of globalization we are witnessing struggles within individual states about what their identity and interests consist in.
Progressive Consequentialsm requires us to make the world better but we are under no obligation to bring about the best possible world.
I worry that even well-intentioned attempts to "improve nature" (say by reducing suffering) will make things worse even in their own terms.
When I first started studying climate change back in the 1980s, I was struck by how difficult it was be for people to understand this issue.
We think of history as another specialization, like philosophy of language, rather than as something that informs everything we do and think.
Moral revolutions are typically seen retrospectively. Prospectively, the revolutionaries tend to look like crazy people, and sometimes they are.
We're good at noticing sudden movements of middle size objects in our immediate visual field, but what is out of sight is for us is largely out of mind.
Most of what we think of as distinctively human has occurred in the last 10,000 years in the Holocene - a period in which the Earth was abnormally quiet.
Many environmental questions are in a deep way philosophical, despite our penchant for treating them as if they were only technological, economic, or whatever.
Climate change involves behaviors that are individually negligible, whose impacts go far beyond the spatial and temporal constraints that define our sense of community.
If we don't have historical consciousness we can't really understand problems in all their dimensions, and if we can't understand problems than we can't find solutions.
Philosophers tend to radically underestimate the distance between abstract principles (such as "reduce suffering") and what it might actually mean for people to act on them.
Is it in the UK's interests to leave the EU? It depends on your values. The answer can't be read off of GDP statistics under various scenarios or some measures of global influence.
We know the "great men" and a handful of heavily cited papers in our specialization. When there is a historical frame around a paper it's often a caricature that has become canonical.
The idea that Bentham and Mill were maximizers is the greatest stretch of all. They were progressivists, committed to improving the societies in which they lived, not utopian maximizers.
We live in a world in which everyone wants solutions. But we can't find solutions if we don't understand the problems, and we can't understand the problems without knowing how we got here.
In the last few centuries we've managed to reduce how much we kill each other, we've learned some basic lessons about public health, and life is relatively good for more people than ever before.
It is probably true that the economic benefits of being in the EU are a net positive to the UK, but a large number of people do not share in these benefits and the result is increasing inequality.
I think that by the middle of this century people will still be eating meat (though less), and their meat will mostly be produced in factories through synthetic processes, cell cultures, and so on.
The Enlightenment dream is a good one. The idea that people should rationally appreciate their place in nature, assess threats and possibilities, and regulate their behavior in response is inspiring.
I take seriously the idea that we are African Apes who (at least for the moment) dominate the planet, but our psychology is pretty much what it was when we were living in small groups on the savanna.
Environmental philosophy just is philosophy full stop. It only sprung up as distinct subfield because mainstream philosophy was ignoring some of the most important philosophical challenges of our time.
We're not good at noticing slow, steady changes in our environments, our senses are not very acute compared to those of many animals, and we're pretty awful at abstract thought, much less acting on it.