To be a utilitarian means that you judge actions as right or wrong in accordance with whether they have good consequences. So you try to do what will have the best consequences for all of those affected.

If we all think only of our own interests, we are headed for collective disaster - just look at what we are doing to our planet's climate.

When you look at food as an ethical issue in the Christian tradition, you don't find very much about it. You don't find, as you do in the Jewish or Islamic or Hindu traditions, a lot of restrictions saying you can eat this but you can't eat that. But what you do find is the idea that gluttony is a sin and that it's something that we ought to be ashamed of.

Torturing a human being is almost always wrong, but it is not absolutely wrong.

After 9/11, the American Red Cross received more than half a billion dollars in donations to help the victims of the terrorist attacks. The families of the victims were already well-provided for by various government funds, so Red Cross simply drew a line across lower Manhattan and offered everyone there financial assistance, whether they needed it or not.

Nineteen thousand children [are] dying every day. Does it really matter that we're not walking past them in the street? Does it really matter that they're far away? I don't think it does make a morally relevant difference.

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?