Even those who specialize in the history of philosophy often ignore the political and cultural context, and the natural world in which their philosophers were philosophizing. This has consequences both trivial and important. If you systematically read the last fifty years of the major journals in our discipline you would be amazed at the amount of redundancy. Most of this is unacknowledged because most of us know so little about the history of our discipline and even the subfields in which we work.

The seas will continue to rise no matter who gets elected president.

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.

Apocalypses don't happen very often. They tend to be separated by tens or even hundreds of millions of years.

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

It's true that climate change is an unprecedented problem so it's not surprising that it's so difficult to address.

I worry that even well-intentioned attempts to "improve nature" (say by reducing suffering) will make things worse even in their own terms.