Claims like 'Slavery is wrong' are not fully common-sensical, so they must be at least partly theoretical.

In the old systems, hierarchies emanate power from above to below through forms of line management and are ideologically supported by cosmologies and theologies featuring celestial rulers and their deputies - the 'rule of the best.'

Epicurus recommends bread and cheese as the staple, and his emphasis is more on avoiding pain than on seeking pleasure, insofar as pleasure-seeking tends to be followed by painful after-effects.

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.

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.

Even if the gods did exist, the Epicureans argued, they didn't care about us. Rather, everything comes from nature, and all that really exists are atoms and void, moving and congregating.

Order can arise from chaos without anyone or anything directing the process when unstable combinations of atoms perish and others persist. In the 17th century, Descartes applied this insight to cosmology, and long before Darwin presented his more rigorous ideas about variation and selection, people began to speculate more openly about the origins of life and the species in Epicurean terms.