If you look at the works psychologists have done about individual reports of wellbeing, what happens is that if you're poor, you are not happy. But once you achieve a certain level of material satisfaction then income has very little correlation with people's reported states of happiness, things like climate matter more, things like the culture of the country in which you're raised matter more and so the things really, let's face it, like individual temperament matter more than these things.

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

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.

If we're interested in the continuation of the human experiment we need to focus on resilience and coping with change (whether natural or anthropogenic) rather than living as if God or nature has given us a nice, orderly, calm, Babbit-like existence.

Aristotle thought that humans are rational animals and Hobbes thought that we act on the basis of rational self-interest. If only! It's not that we never do these things, it's that they are hardly constituative of who and what we are.

I grew up as an only child of two parents who had dropped out of high school. They had enormous respect for education and encouraged me as a child when I had strong interests in both math and science, but we really didn't have much by way of educational role modeling in our family.

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