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.

There'll come a time when airplanes are much more efficient when it comes to producing lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions, there'll come a time when we'll be able to offset those emissions much more effectively than we do now. But alas at the moment, flying airplanes is really one of the least defensible things that we do and it's one of the things that I indulge in quite frequently, alas.

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

In much of the world today there are no more chilling words than "I'm from the United States and I'm here to help you."

A great deal of our math, science, philosophy, and everyday behavior presupposes that stability and equilibria are the "default" states, and everything else involves some "perturbation." This is a mental model, a conceptual frame, a tacit belief, a presupposition - whatever you want to call it.

Philosophers are often actively disinterested in what happens between the cup and the lips (after all, that's "non-ideal theory").

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