Ethics is prescriptive and can change behavior, but usually only at the margins.

On my reading of history people who want to bring us the best are usually the people we ought to be afraid of.

The problem is that the Enlightenment dream may make too many demands on poor African apes like us. We may just not be up to it.

Apocalypses don't happen very often. They tend to be separated by tens or even hundreds of millions of years.

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.

Kantians are saddled with absolutist views, Aristotelians are accused of vagueness, and there is almost no horror to which Consequentialists are innocent of, according to some critics. While all these families of views have been victimized in these ways, Consequentialists have gotten the worst of it. I think this may have something to do with the fact that Kant and Aristotle are acknowledged to be great philosophers, and we tend to read the greats sympathetically, while Consequentialism is a family of views not rooted in the work of a single great man to whom this kind of deference is owed.

Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased.