This is the deal: we are happy to single out people as superior just as long as they don't accept the description themselves. We want heroes and idols but we also want egalitarianism and that requires proclamations of humility from our Gods.

Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe that the universe is governed by benign forces, at some point you have to explain why there is so much suffering, misfortune and misery in the world.

I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere.

People should not expect the state to protect them from fraudsters. If we do, we get into the habit of neglecting our own powers of intellectual discernment.

Rules matter, and to be rules they need to be universal in form: always do this, never do that. But it is foolish to rule out in advance the possibility that an occasion might arise when normal rules just don't apply. Rules are not there to be broken, but sometimes break them we must.

The simplest and clearest motivation for taking animal welfare seriously is the recognition that pain is in and of itself a bad thing, and that to inflict significant amounts of it unnecessarily is wrong.

If I'm a CEO and I say, 'Misogyny will not be tolerated', that's a more powerful statement than 'It is my sincere hope and our intention to eradicate misogyny from this company'. Sometimes saying things in that more categorical form, has a real function. Although, if you dig beneath it, it is actually one of J.L. Austin's illocutionary acts; you're trying to make something happen rather than describing something already happened. The fact that it has the grammatical form of a description is fine.