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.

Sometimes I say philosophers should be at the table because they're the only people who know that they're not going to walk away with big money to support their research or to fund their crackpot solutions.

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

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

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.

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.

Some philosophers think that the idea of a consequentialist virtue theory is strange, but the real strength of consequentialism is that it can emulate the requirements of other moral theories when it is the case that acting on those theories would improve the world.