The more you read the novella, the more you should wonder, I think, which judgments are to be taken as bedrock.

Ethical inquiry has always been motivated by the aim of improving human conduct. It doesn't follow from that that the goal is to produce a complete rule book that would be applicable to all cases.

I would like to undermine the stereotype of "strict philosophy." J.L. Austin remarked that, when philosophy is done well, it's all over by the bottom of the first page. I take him to have meant that the real work comes in setting up the problem with which you are dealing, and thus getting your reader to take particular things for granted.

I argue against literal interpretation of religious doctrines. Religions make progress when they emancipate themselves from literalism, and take their doctrinal statements to be metaphors or allegories.

In my current work on global warming, I argue that the only apparent solution to the deep problem of climate change would require very large transfers of wealth from rich nations to poor nations, so that the entire world can make the transition to renewable forms of energy as fast as possible.

The theory of evolution explains to us what our ancestry has been. It does not explain away our worth. Why should we be afraid to learn more about what we are?

Mann's Death in Venice actually contains a snippet of philosophy about the second question, when Aschenbach, collapsed in the plaza, engages in his quasi-Socratic, anti-Socratic, ruminations.