The idea that we would raise billions of sentient animals, treat them horribly, pollute our waterways with their waste, compromise the effectiveness of our antibiotics so that they grow faster, and then slaughter them with little regard to their suffering so that we can feed off their corpses, will seem to most people unthinkably cruel and barbarous - sort of in the way that we think of medieval punishments, or Europeans today think of the death penalty.

I begin with human psychology and then see what we can say about ethics.

Even if Bill McKibben were to become dictator, future generations would suffer because of the carbon we had already emitted.

Ethical systems are fundamentally conservative and primarily directed towards regulating interactions within communities.

In the face of the collective action problems that are at the heart of the environmental crisis, consequentialists should seek to inculcate the "green virtues" which includes the virtue of cooperativeness. This would not bring about the best possible world but it would set us on the path of making it better.

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

Progressive Consequentialsm requires us to make the world better but we are under no obligation to bring about the best possible world.