The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment.... Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it.

There are no general-interest media that all of us can tap into. I'm not a good person to talk to about social media. I just avoid it. I'm suspicious also of the culture of venting. But the bigger question is, How can we in this media world have a genuine civic conversation? I mean, look at Franklin Roosevelt. He had these radio talks that all Americans listened to, and there was a common civic conversation that came out of it.

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.

Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger.

It's not as though there aren't many, many art works and many other cultures, but there was something special about the civic nature of the Greek theater. All the citizens stopped working. They came into these theaters. It wasn't like a Broadway theater where you sit in the dark and you expect to be passively entertained. You're in this theater, amphitheater, in bright sunlight looking at your fellow citizens, recognizing their faces, and thinking with them about the future of your city. I think very few cultures have had a theatrical tradition that is quite so civic.

People don't just want to feel satisfied. They actually want to act.

There was a time, before I was in graduate school, when political philosophy pretty much ceased to exist. The positivists thought there were only two things you could do: conceptual analysis or empirical investigation. Any kind of political theory or even ethical theory was nonsense.