Kant does represents a distinctively modern view of the human condition in contrast to that of ancient high culture, found in ancient Greek ethics and also in ancient Chinese ethics.

Virtues consist not only of acting in certain ways, but in ways of caring and feeling.

The problem I see with utilitarianism, or any form of consequentialism, is not that it gets the wrong answers to moral questions. I think just about any moral theory, worked out intelligently, and applied with good judgment, would get just about the same results as any other.

Since the Enlightenment, popular religion has rejected the Enlightenment path and transformed itself into a bastion of resistance against reason.

I wish that our culture could retain the symbolism and emotional power of traditional religion while combining it with reason and science and using the combination to enhance our humanity rather than impoverishing it by choosing the one side or the other.

Since we cannot know too much about the long term effects of our particular lives, and since success and fame are not good measures of the value of what we have done, it should be enough for any of us that as far as we can tell, in some small way we have made humanity's future better rather than worse.

People are often most proud of precisely those things of which they should most be ashamed.