It is quite possible that we will soon come to live under some sort of global despotism, enlightened or not. This is not a nice prospect. And there is only one way of avoiding that this happens: to establish a global democracy. And it is not too late to strive for such a democracy, of a straightforward populist nature, where people on the globe elect a world parliament, which in turn elects a world government.

I do believe that what I have called populist democracy is to be preferred to what I have called elitist democracy.

I believe that one basic question, what we ought to do, period (the moral question), is a genuine one. There exists a true answer to it, which is independent of our thought and conceptualisation.

If two norms conflict, if they are mutually inconsistent, then at least one of them must be false.

It is of note that even if utilitarianism has proved to be superior to deontology and the libertarian moral rights theory in the area of killing, we are not allowed to say that it has been finally vindicated; it has to face other challenges in other areas, in particular in situations of distributive justice.

There are some particular moral truths that I believe we have access to (such as the one not to inflict pain on a sentient being for no reason).

It is hard to tell if capital punishment has such an effect. And even if, in some contexts it has (such as in the American South with a very high incidence of murder), this effect may very well go away if a decent welfare state was replaced for the existing social order.