Disgust relies on moral obtuseness. It is possible to view another human being as a slimy slug or a piece of revolting trash only if one has never made a serious good-faith attempt to see the world through that person’s eyes or to experience that person’s feelings. Disgust imputes to the other a subhuman nature. How, by contrast, do we ever become able to see one another as human? Only through the exercise of imagination.

The thing that I find so bad about anger is the desire for payback. Of course, it is very human to wish for revenge. Your mother has died in the hospital, and the first thought a lot of people have is, I'll sue the doctor. You feel helpless, and you think, I'm less helpless if I'm doing something active that makes someone else pay. And social media make it easy to inflict all kinds of pain on other people. But what good does it do?

The EU might have become a large federal nation. But they would have had to do things differently. Number one, they would've had to make people feel like participants in a common project of autonomous law-giving. Much more political accountability, much more participation. That didn't happen, I think, because the movers and shakers were more concerned with economic union than political union.

Choice matters. You might have the opportunity to eat a nutritious diet, though you might choose to eat a lousy diet. What matters is the opportunity.

A person in torment is not going to give you anything.

I think that's what we really need in America, for people to hear each other. And I think philosophy could do a little bit better on that.

The humanities teach us the value, even for business, of criticism and dissent. When there's a culture of going along to get along, where whistleblowers are discouraged, bad things happen and businesses implode.