In the last few centuries we've managed to reduce how much we kill each other, we've learned some basic lessons about public health, and life is relatively good for more people than ever before.

I worry that even well-intentioned attempts to "improve nature" (say by reducing suffering) will make things worse even in their own terms.

If we're interested in the continuation of the human experiment we need to focus on resilience and coping with change (whether natural or anthropogenic) rather than living as if God or nature has given us a nice, orderly, calm, Babbit-like existence.

Increasingly both environmentalists and animal ethicists recognize the enormous destruction caused by animal agriculture.

Our traditional systems of decision-making are just not up to preventing changes in fundamental earth systems that are driven by a constant barrage of individually negligible emissions of an invisible, odorless gas, by billions of people all over the world.

Ethical systems are fundamentally conservative and primarily directed towards regulating interactions within communities.

None of us are rational economic men as we're supposed to be portrayed in economic theory where mixes of passions, of desires, of moral principles, of self-deception, of altruism, of concern of others, of concerns for ourselves and an interest in our bank accounts. And social policies have to be responsive to the complexity of who we are as people or else, like the war on drugs, they're simply going to fail.