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

I think the challenge of climate change in particular is the challenge for us to create and produce new norms for a new kind of world. And that's why I think as important as the issue of climate change is, it's even more important than it seems because if we can't evolve very quickly, new norms to deal with issues like climate change, we're not going to be able to survive in the kind of world we've created. So I think, really, the whole nature of democracy, of governance, of global community and of solving the kinds of problems of the 21st Century are really at stake.

It's possible that we'll screw up the climate so badly that most of us will die and a few breeding pairs will remain somewhere in the arctic. What's more likely is that we'll continue remaking the planet, driving many species to extinction, killing millions of people through the indirect effects of climate change, making life even harder for the poor and powerless than it is now, and making it a little more difficult for the global middle class to live the lives to which they have become accustomed - in other words, business as usual, only worse.

The erosion of agency has consequences for our politics. As a result of all this, the fundamental ethical challenge of the anthropocene is the recovery of agency, or alternatively to come to terms with its loss and to understand how to go on.

The millennium development goals are important, both morally and economically, because much of the world's population maybe is as much as a third of the world's population hasn't yet reached the level of economic development where we begin to get a dissociation from people's economic status and their reports about personal happiness. So we really do need to do much more and much more effectively in order to give everyone the kind of basis for which they can have good vibes.

The Enlightenment is not a nightmare, nor is it something that comes easily to us. It is an aspiration - and a good one!

The Paris climate conference in December, 2015 was a recognition that countries bring their climate policies to international meetings rather than create them during the negotiations (much less do they receive orders from the international community and then go home and implement them).