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.

Much of the point of individual action is really to communicate with other people and with political leaders and to demonstrate to them that we are willing to live lives which are less dependent on fossil fuels and we'll show you that now by changing our individual life to some extent but we want you to take action, political leaders, so that we aren't living in a society in which we're dependent on poisoning the future in order to maintain present lifestyles.

The very essence of civilized culture is that we deliberately institute, in advance of the happening of various contingencies and emergencies of life, devices for detecting their approach and registering their nature, for warding off what is unfavorable or at least for protecting ourselves from its full impact.

The most fundamental challenge of the anthropocene concerns agency. For those who lived the Enlightenment dream (always a minority but an influential one), agency was taken for granted. There were existential threats to agency (e.g., determinism) but philosophy mobilized to refute these threats (e.g., by defending libertarianism) or to defuse them (e.g., by showing that they were compatible with agency).

Even those who specialize in the history of philosophy often ignore the political and cultural context, and the natural world in which their philosophers were philosophizing. This has consequences both trivial and important. If you systematically read the last fifty years of the major journals in our discipline you would be amazed at the amount of redundancy. Most of this is unacknowledged because most of us know so little about the history of our discipline and even the subfields in which we work.

Well, one measure of a good life, I think, is to be engaged in projects that one thinks are meaningful and worthwhile. So I would put the emphasis of a good life on activity, on the walk rather than the destination, and I think that most of the things that any of us do that are really valuable and really important are projects that we really shouldn't expect to be completed in our lifetime because if they could completed in our lifetime, they probably wouldn't be so important that we should devote our lives to them.

The problem is that for almost any feature of humanity that you can name, whether it's the ability to suffer, whether it's the capacity to reason, whether it's having lives that can go better or worse, there are at least some other non-human animals that have all of these features as well. So to exclude non-human animals from the range of moral concern but to include all humans, just seems morally arbitrary.