We're not good at noticing slow, steady changes in our environments, our senses are not very acute compared to those of many animals, and we're pretty awful at abstract thought, much less acting on it.

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

Since for me moral demands necessarily flow from human psychology, I don't think we can be obliged to do something that we are not motivated in any way to do. In other words, I'm an "internalist" about morality.

Philosophers tend to radically underestimate the distance between abstract principles (such as "reduce suffering") and what it might actually mean for people to act on them.

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

It's possible that we'll screw up the climate so badly that most of us will die and a few breeding pairs will remain somewhere in the arctic. What's more likely is that we'll continue remaking the planet, driving many species to extinction, killing millions of people through the indirect effects of climate change, making life even harder for the poor and powerless than it is now, and making it a little more difficult for the global middle class to live the lives to which they have become accustomed - in other words, business as usual, only worse.

Well, one measure of a good life, I think, is to be engaged in projects that one thinks are meaningful and worthwhile. So I would put the emphasis of a good life on activity, on the walk rather than the destination, and I think that most of the things that any of us do that are really valuable and really important are projects that we really shouldn't expect to be completed in our lifetime because if they could completed in our lifetime, they probably wouldn't be so important that we should devote our lives to them.