Citizens often think of a state's interests in terms of the promotion of ideals such as democracy, a particular way of life, or other values which they endorse or see as part of their historical continuity and identity. In this domain as in others values are not fixed, and so a state's interests are dynamic and in a constant state of negotiation and construction.

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.

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

Some philosophers have begun writing sympathetically about predator elimination as a way of reducing animal suffering. From an environmental perspective this is somewhere between naïve and potentially disastrous.

If you have a flat, fixed view of state interest then it is difficult to understand why some states adopt aggressive climate change policies, even when that risks economically disadvantaging them, and other states do not even when it would be in their economic interests to do so.

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

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.