Does God have a reason for wanting us to be charitable, to take care of those who can't take care of themselves? Either God does or God doesn't, it's just logic. If God has a reason then there is a reason independent of God and whatever God's reason is we should figure it out for ourselves. There is a reason and God doesn't really ground morality at all. God wants us to give charity because it's the right thing to do.

Almost everybody thinks about philosophy, even if they don't realize it's philosophy and even if they have no sense of the difficulty of the problems, the array of possible answers.

In Greek, our word for play is paidia and the word for education is paideia, and it is very natural and right that these words should be entangled at the root, together with our word for children, paides, which gave you your words pedagogy and pediatrician.

Less money spent on billboards that just make us feel good about ourselves and more on soup kitchens and organized visits to the sick and dying.

Given cognitive vulnerabilities, it would be convenient to have an arrangement whereby reality could tell us off; and that is precisely what science is. Scientific methodology is the arrangement that allows reality to answer us back.

If we look at our attitudes consistently and work out the logical implications we're on the road to moral progress, moral understanding.

I like that there are so many different ways of looking at the world and I like all of the particular narratives. In any case we will never all see the same way on these [religious] issues. It's the way liberals and conservatives will never see the same way on individuals whereas it’s different orientations and they go too deep down and when we're dealing with questions that can't be definitively answered by science that's where you're sort of... your orientation swells in to fill up the gaps and so we're never always going to agree.