Aristotle thought that humans are rational animals and Hobbes thought that we act on the basis of rational self-interest. If only! It's not that we never do these things, it's that they are hardly constituative of who and what we are.

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

Since we're not very good at something as basic as controlling our reproduction, life is really bad for more people than ever before.

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

The seas will continue to rise no matter who gets elected president.

Environmental problems provoke challenges about what kind of world we want, how important we think it is if something is brought about by human action or by brute nature, what we think of the value of human life compared to that of other living things.

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