We think of history as another specialization, like philosophy of language, rather than as something that informs everything we do and think.

We can use economic instruments to help realize our goals but economics does not tell us what our goals should be.

The problem is that the Enlightenment dream may make too many demands on poor African apes like us. We may just not be up to it.

Our differences should not be exaggerated.

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.

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.

Kantians are saddled with absolutist views, Aristotelians are accused of vagueness, and there is almost no horror to which Consequentialists are innocent of, according to some critics. While all these families of views have been victimized in these ways, Consequentialists have gotten the worst of it. I think this may have something to do with the fact that Kant and Aristotle are acknowledged to be great philosophers, and we tend to read the greats sympathetically, while Consequentialism is a family of views not rooted in the work of a single great man to whom this kind of deference is owed.