Trade has played a vital role in the social evolution of humankind. It allowed people to specialise, which raises both skill levels and efficiency. It brought people from different lands together, co-operating rather than competing over resources.

If I hammer my own thumb while doing some DIY, it's not nice, but it's not the end of the world. To care obsessively about similar levels of discomfort in animals seems to be a case of mistaken moral priorities.

True virtue would never liken its rewards to points on a loyalty card, not because it is its own reward, but because it is not something we should practice to accrue future benefits.

Once Steve Fuller said that there is this idea that your responsibility as an intellectual is just to speak the truth as you see it. But actually, you should be more appreciative of what needs to be said. I don't think that's ever an excuse to say something you don't believe is true - but sometimes the emphasis has to be different. Well, if I'm talking to an audience of hardline atheists, I'll be trying to unsettle them a bit more, whereas, if I'm speaking to an audience of believers, I'll be giving them more of the pros of atheism. It's about having a sensitivity to context.

I never thought I was cut out for a life of crime. I even felt guilty when I accidentally stole a Subbuteo catalogue, thinking it was free. But everyone has an inner rebel, and mine has finally found a natural outlet. My crime of choice is that, with a heart as cold as ice and no care for what society thinks, I steal wireless computer network time.

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.

Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy's pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else.