People talk about the idea of special relationships, that is, the morality only really binds people who stand in some kind of contractual relationship with each other but in fact if you take that seriously as a criteria of when we have a moral relationship then it's hard to see why we would have moral obligations to strangers for example or people who live across the sea from us but yet, every decent person believes that we do.

In the face of the collective action problems that are at the heart of the environmental crisis, consequentialists should seek to inculcate the "green virtues" which includes the virtue of cooperativeness. This would not bring about the best possible world but it would set us on the path of making it better.

Even if Bill McKibben were to become dictator, future generations would suffer because of the carbon we had already emitted.

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 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.

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.

I grew up as an only child of two parents who had dropped out of high school. They had enormous respect for education and encouraged me as a child when I had strong interests in both math and science, but we really didn't have much by way of educational role modeling in our family.