You can't go through a graduate programme in other humanities subjects and be considered competent in those fields unless you've done some work on gender and race issues. Feminist work is mainstream. In philosophy that's just not true. You could go through a philosophy degree to this day and never have a class by a woman, never have to encounter anything having to do with feminism or gender or race.

The object of the exercise is to understand what we can do to stop something bad. It would be better if people stopped for the purest of motives, but it’s best if they stop. And if the choice is between their stopping for the wrong reasons and their not stopping I favour their stopping for the wrong reasons. Kant may be right that people ought to stop killing because they see that it’s wrong. That ought to be enough, but it may not be, and if it isn’t, if there’s something else that can actually get them to stop, then I favour using it.

Darwin said that our social instincts are so crucial to our lives that they must have been strongly developed during evolution by means of group-selection. These instincts now ground our motives and shape the complexity of our lives. So the idea of deriving all our motivation from the single stem of “selfishness” is radically mistaken.

As the American President Jimmy Carter put it, “Penalties for possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself”. I infer that cannabis prohibition is morally unjustified.

I do not see why all philosophers should be interested in communicating their thoughts to the world. Philosophy is no different in this regard from pure mathematics or microbiology. The idea that every scientist should be a part-time public speaker is absurd.

The worst pains seem to be worse than the best pleasures are good. Anybody who doubts this should consider what choice they would make if they wereoffered the option of securing an hour of the most sublime pleasures possible in exchange for suffering an hour of the worst pain possible.

As a humanist I find it annoying when people claim that a life of creative activity and supportive relationships, taking on a determinate shape over time, is not enough because it lacks the essential element. It leaves out “spirituality” and has no room for God. What basis do they have for the claim that it’s not enough?

To enjoy life is to be pleased, delighted, and satisfied with it; to live with relish, to savour and take pleasure especially in parts of it we regard as important, and to want the life to continue by and large in the way it has been going. The most important thing we can do is live in a way that reflects what we most deeply care about.

Clearly some parental aims get the parent-child relationship started on the wrong foot. It’s not OK to have a child so you’ll later have a tennis partner. It is OK to want responsibility, focus, bonding with a partner, and the pleasures of daily life with children.

We should see a very close connection between two fields of philosophy which are nowadays kept well apart, namely ethics and epistemology. Indeed, if the good life and virtue consist in knowledge, then the study of knowledge just is the study of ethics.

Being moral sometimes handicaps decent people in their pursuit of worthwhile goals. This is especially likely to happen when those with power in society have badly mistaken ideas about what morality requires. A good person might not last long in a bad society.

The hero might do something that he or she may regret later, but since the action is so boldly and decisively undertaken, we can’t help but be impressed. We may even find ourselves awed by the magnificence of an action that is ethically abhorrent.