Sometimes we know the best thing to do, but fail to do it. New year's resolutions are often like that. We make resolutions because we know it would be better for us to lose weight, or get fit, or spend more time with our children. The problem is that a resolution is generally easier to break than it is to keep.

If you're buying animal products and can go to the farm and actually see how the animals are looked after, yes, that's an important point. That's definitely the best way of assuring yourself that the animals are being well treated.

According to the Dominant Western tradition, the natural world exists for the benefit of human beings.

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.

My view is different from this, only to the extent that if a decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life-support - which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection - but also by taking active steps to end the baby's life swiftly and humanely.

We should give the same respect to the lives of animals as we do to the lives of humans.

Somebody who eats twice as much factory-farmed products as he or she needs to is clearly doing twice as much damage to the planet. From a utilitarian point of view, that's twice as bad.