We don't usually think of what we eat as a matter of ethics. Stealing, lying, hurting people - these acts are obviously relevant to our moral character. In ancient Greece and Rome, ethical choices about food were considered at least as significant as ethical choices about sex.

We see things like reciprocity which are fairly central to our view of ethics. But if you're talking about a set of worked-out rules on what we are supposed to do then, yes, it is a human product.

Today, if you have an Internet connection, you have at your fingertips an amount of information previously available only to those with access to the world's greatest libraries - indeed, in most respects what is available through the Internet dwarfs those libraries, and it is incomparably easier to find what you need.

At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn't mean that you can't think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places.

Capitalism is very far from a perfect system, but so far we have yet to find anything that clearly does a better job of meeting human needs than a regulated capitalist economy coupled with a welfare and health care system that meets the basic needs of those who do not thrive in the capitalist economy. If we ever do find a better system, I'll be happy to call myself an anti-capitalist.

If penicillin had been judged by its toxicity to guinea pigs, it might never have been used by man.

Charitable giving is a huge sector in the United States. It amounts to $350 billion a year. And yet, I can't help feeling that a lot of that is wasted because people have not been thinking about how to do it as effectively as possible.