In any matter of moral importance, our first task, before we plunge ahead and decide what to do, is to figure out what we ought to do.

Marx's writings still have something to teach us about capitalism. They have little or nothing to teach us about any alternatives to it. Anyone who had read them knows that.

As I understand it, Kantian constructivism is partly a position in normative ethics and partly a position in metaethics. In metaethics, it is the position that ethical claims have truth values, but their truth conditions consist not in a set of objective facts to which they correspond, but instead in the outcome of some procedure of deliberation resulting in decisions about what to do.

Fichte is a necessary step to both Hegel and Marx.

I think if there were to be a solution to the problem of free will, it would have to be a compatibilist one. Unfortunately, from that it does not follow that there is such a solution. Many philosophers find this an unwelcome message, and as often happens in philosophy, they punish the messenger by ascribing to him an entirely imaginary but untenable position.

People who enjoy the privileges of success must use these privileges to benefit those who do not have them. These privileges constitute a deep hole they need to climb out of if they are to prevent its being the case that the world would have been better off if they had never been born.

Teaching and writing about philosophy is about the only thing I've ever been really good at.