I begin with human psychology and then see what we can say about ethics.

I think, questions about what it means to respect nature become very important because just as in human society, for example, part of what it is for me to live a good life as a human being in a human society is to have respect for others around me. Now, that respect, to some extent, can be thought of as being grounded in the rights and interest of others but it also has to do with the stance that I take in the world and what it is that provides meaning and significance in my own life and I think there are similar ideas of respect for nature that apply as well.

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

Climate change involves behaviors that are individually negligible, whose impacts go far beyond the spatial and temporal constraints that define our sense of community.

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.

I see a lot of individual action when it comes to environmental questions really as a form of politics as a way of communicating with political leaders, much in the same way that acts of civil disobedience during the civil rights' movement were really acts of political communication, trying to get laws changed rather than based on the thought that the individual action would really change the practices of segregation.

I think when it comes to climate change, the single most important thing in the world is for the United States' Congress to pass an effective bill that will put a price in carbon because if it starts costing something to emit carbon, this will provide an incentive, people do act on the basis to some extent of economic incentives to emit fewer greenhouse gases.