Obama's clean power plan, methane regulations, and increased fuel economy standards are about as good as our political system can do at this point in our history. Let's embrace these things, make them work, and push for more, rather than denouncing them because they're 9th best (which they are).

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

[This approach] displays the characteristic philosophical lust to vanquish the skeptic by arguing him out of his skepticism, without appeal to moral and political considerations or to the facts of everyday life. [...] But more often than not, if you give the skeptic everything he wants, then he will be successful in repulsing your attacks and terrorizing your position.

The idea that Bentham and Mill were maximizers is the greatest stretch of all. They were progressivists, committed to improving the societies in which they lived, not utopian maximizers.

In the last few centuries we've managed to reduce how much we kill each other, we've learned some basic lessons about public health, and life is relatively good for more people than ever before.

Since for me moral demands necessarily flow from human psychology, I don't think we can be obliged to do something that we are not motivated in any way to do. In other words, I'm an "internalist" about morality.

Most of what we think of as distinctively human has occurred in the last 10,000 years in the Holocene - a period in which the Earth was abnormally quiet.