What you could say, and what I do argue in the book, is that he doesn't have as much concern for the lives of Iraqis as he does for the lives of Americans, or even frozen American embryos.

But I think the majority of cows, and even more so chickens and pigs, are leading pretty miserable lives.

The Internet, like the steam engine, is a technological breakthrough that changed the world.

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.

If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?

Looking back on my career, I think I've been extremely fortunate to be in the right place at the right time in order to have the influence that I did.

Take for example providing a guide dog for a blind person. That's a good thing to do, right? All right. It is a good thing to do. But you have to think what else you could do with the resources. It costs about $40,000 to train a guide dog and train the recipient so that the guide dog can be an effective help to a blind person. It costs somewhere between 20 and $50 to cure a blind person in a developing country if they have trachoma. So you do the sums, and you could provide one guide dog for one blind American or you could cure between 400 and 2,000 people of blindness.