Dale Jamieson Quotes
In this era of globalization we are witnessing struggles within individual states about what their identity and interests consist in.
Apocalypses don't happen very often. They tend to be separated by tens or even hundreds of millions of years.
Since we're not very good at something as basic as controlling our reproduction, life is really bad for more people than ever before.
I take seriously the idea that we are African Apes who (at least for the moment) dominate the planet, but our psychology is pretty much what it was when we were living in small groups on the savanna.
Moral revolutions are typically seen retrospectively. Prospectively, the revolutionaries tend to look like crazy people, and sometimes they are.
Philosophers are often actively disinterested in what happens between the cup and the lips (after all, that's "non-ideal theory").
It is probably true that the economic benefits of being in the EU are a net positive to the UK, but a large number of people do not share in these benefits and the result is increasing inequality.
Is it in the UK's interests to leave the EU? It depends on your values. The answer can't be read off of GDP statistics under various scenarios or some measures of global influence.
We live in a world in which everyone wants solutions. But we can't find solutions if we don't understand the problems, and we can't understand the problems without knowing how we got here.
In the last few centuries we've managed to reduce how much we kill each other, we've learned some basic lessons about public health, and life is relatively good for more people than ever before.
Most of what we think of as distinctively human has occurred in the last 10,000 years in the Holocene - a period in which the Earth was abnormally quiet.
The problem is that the Enlightenment dream may make too many demands on poor African apes like us. We may just not be up to it.
Many environmental questions are in a deep way philosophical, despite our penchant for treating them as if they were only technological, economic, or whatever.
Increasingly both environmentalists and animal ethicists recognize the enormous destruction caused by animal agriculture.
I worry that even well-intentioned attempts to "improve nature" (say by reducing suffering) will make things worse even in their own terms.
Every country now has its own domestic political debate about how to respond to climate change. This is where the action is.
Even if Bill McKibben were to become dictator, future generations would suffer because of the carbon we had already emitted.
When I first started studying climate change back in the 1980s, I was struck by how difficult it was be for people to understand this issue.
Philosophers tend to radically underestimate the distance between abstract principles (such as "reduce suffering") and what it might actually mean for people to act on them.
We can use economic instruments to help realize our goals but economics does not tell us what our goals should be.
Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased.
I think that by the middle of this century people will still be eating meat (though less), and their meat will mostly be produced in factories through synthetic processes, cell cultures, and so on.
Ethical systems are fundamentally conservative and primarily directed towards regulating interactions within communities.
Climate change involves behaviors that are individually negligible, whose impacts go far beyond the spatial and temporal constraints that define our sense of community.
Climate change involves fundamental choices about how we want to live and what kind of world we want.
On my reading of history people who want to bring us the best are usually the people we ought to be afraid of.
In much of the world today there are no more chilling words than "I'm from the United States and I'm here to help you."
We're good at noticing sudden movements of middle size objects in our immediate visual field, but what is out of sight is for us is largely out of mind.
The Enlightenment dream is a good one. The idea that people should rationally appreciate their place in nature, assess threats and possibilities, and regulate their behavior in response is inspiring.
The Enlightenment is not a nightmare, nor is it something that comes easily to us. It is an aspiration - and a good one!
It's true that climate change is an unprecedented problem so it's not surprising that it's so difficult to address.
We know the "great men" and a handful of heavily cited papers in our specialization. When there is a historical frame around a paper it's often a caricature that has become canonical.
We think of history as another specialization, like philosophy of language, rather than as something that informs everything we do and think.
If we don't have historical consciousness we can't really understand problems in all their dimensions, and if we can't understand problems than we can't find solutions.
The idea that Bentham and Mill were maximizers is the greatest stretch of all. They were progressivists, committed to improving the societies in which they lived, not utopian maximizers.
Progressive Consequentialsm requires us to make the world better but we are under no obligation to bring about the best possible world.
