Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.

Something about the topic of consciousness makes people, like the White Queen in Through The Looking Glass, believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Genetically influenced behavior is not necessarily good and not necessarily unchangeable. Explanations of bad behavior that appeal to genes do not absolve a person any more than do explanations that appeal to upbringing.

The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization.

People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but to contemplate the use of force to bring about a better world, mindful of the trade-off between a small amount of violence now and acceptance of an unjust status quo indefinitely.

We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way.

I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net.