The life-world of human and animal experience, with colours, tastes, solid objects, is a perceptual effect of massed atoms.

We are now returning to the 18th century empirical approach with the new interest in the evolutionary basis of ethics, with 'experimental' moral philosophy and moral psychology. As a result, we understand better why moral formulas are experienced as ineluctable commands, even if there is no commander and even if the notion of an inescapable obligation is just superstition. So moral philosophy has made huge progress.

A moral rule is essentially 'advantage-reducing.' It prohibits you doing something you could do that would serve your interests at someone else's expense.

Epicurus thought of justice as an agreement to prevent people harming and being harmed.

Atomism had no absolute 'above' and 'below' and no such rulers, so favoured the undersranding of justice as an agreement amongst equals.

For seventeenth-century astronomers, the Epicurean doctrine of multiple worlds separated by void space was seen to fit with the new Copernican system in which every star was a sun, and the universe was a vast place with no centre.

Even if you just want to make a simple clothing item for yourself or go for a long hike in the forest - something we imagine requires absolutely no resources - you have to go to the store and buy a lot of stuff, and probably use a car.