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.

Attitudes are changing very quickly.

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.

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

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.

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

On my reading of history people who want to bring us the best are usually the people we ought to be afraid of.