What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

An area of land used for crops will feed about ten times as many people as the same area of land used for grass-fed beef.

To explain our conventional ethical attitudes, is not to justify them.

Pro Life’ or ‘Right to Life’ movement is misnamed. Those who protest against abortion but dine regularly on the bodies of chickens, pigs and calves can hardly claim to have concern for ‘life’ as such. Their concern about embryos and fetuses suggests only a biased concern for the lives of members of our own species.

To say that life is meaningless is to express an attitude, not to state a fact

...moral relativism, a position many find attractive only until they are faced with someone who is doing something really, really wrong.

Cheats prosper until there are enough who bear grudges against them to make sure they do not prosper.

Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.

Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.