To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control.

If you really do want to increase women's status, you could focus on just that, but you'd probably better focus also on women's education. Access to artificial contraception, I would say, is also a very important determinant of women's status.

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.

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.

Economists get impatient with philosophy. They are often trained as skilled mathematicians. They don't like going back to ordinary language and first principles.

Today, I think, the state of philosophizing about democracy is very healthy. It bridges political science and philosophy, as it should.

We are lucky in the United States to have our liberal arts system. In most countries, if you go to university, you have to decide for all English literature or no literature, all philosophy or no philosophy. But we have a system that is one part general education and one part specialization. If your parents say you've got to major in computer science, you can do that. But you can also take general education courses in the humanities, and usually you have to.