It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim ‘never say never’ is one of the most important in ethics.

Daily life is better when it involves interactions with real people who have a personal investment in their labour, like shopkeepers, than it is with someone ‘just doing my job’ or the infernal self-checkout machine.

Most people believe, more or less, that the value of a human life is the same, irrespective of where on the planet it happens to find itself. But, of course, not every life has the...

Nature deals the cards without thought or care, and there is no point in blaming the dealer. All we can do is make the best of the hands we have been dealt.

Wellbeing is a notion that entails our values about the good life, and questions of values are not ultimately scientific questions.

Justice can only be dispensed when you have all the facts in front of you.

The simplest and clearest motivation for taking animal welfare seriously is the recognition that pain is in and of itself a bad thing, and that to inflict significant amounts of it unnecessarily is wrong.

Too often, complaint is not about principled objection on moral grounds, but opportunistic objection on grounds of self-interest. To rectify this, we need to work on mastering the art of complaint.

Cooking can be rewarding when it is a choice and no longer the onerous duty of the housewife, and when a dishwasher can lighten the load at the other end of the process.

There are many things you shouldn’t measure. Don’t, for example, try to measure how much you love your wife!

It’s not leftovers that are wasteful, but those who either don’t know what to do with them or can’t be bothered.

Dover’s cliffs call to mind the Roman invasion; the Battle of Britain; our proximity to, yet difference from, mainland Europe; and international trade and exploration, both fair and exploitative.

No genuine choice is ever simply a matter of the arbitrary exercise of will. Take your choice of lunch today. You can’t decide to want anything, but what you want will at least in part...

Any celebration meal to which guests are invited, be they family or friends, should be an occasion for generous hospitality.

Constructive complaint requires only two things: that what you are complaining about should be different, and that it can be different. It sounds simple, but too often our protests fail this test.

Life is full of what-ifs, many of which could easily have been realities, had just a few things been different.

Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on...

If there’s one thing that makes me cynical, it’s optimists. They are just far too cynical about cynicism. If only they could see that cynics can be happy, constructive, even fun to hang out with,...

If there is an art of living, it is not something that can be taught timelessly. We have lessons to learn from Aristotle et al, for sure, but not if we simply uproot them from...

As a teenager, I increasingly had questions about religion to which I found no good answers.

Being a good neighbour is about compassion, which is as warm-blooded as justice is cool-headed.

I don’t feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere.

On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data.

I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or...

If we find it hard to believe that winning millions might not be so lucky after all, we just don’t have a good enough imagination. If I fantasise about winning the lottery, it doesn’t take...

When you try to cool down hot emotions, what tends to happen is that you end up either repressing them or losing them altogether. Neither is desirable. Without emotion, much social interaction loses its meaning...

True virtue would never liken its rewards to points on a loyalty card, not because it is its own reward, but because it is not something we should practice to accrue future benefits.

The very act of questioning whether you exist proves you do, because you must be there for the doubt to be entertained in the first place.

The idea that the mind can extend even beyond the body is an intriguing one, and is bound to become more pressing as we increasingly develop technologies that augment our natural abilities.

If philosophy is to be a valuable part of life, we have to appreciate it for its own sake, and not just for what it’s done for us lately.

Untested assumptions and lazy habits of thought can be shown up, once put in a spotlight of a different hue.

Prayer provides an opportunity to remind oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, should we have it. This is, I think, a pretty...

People do care where their food, or other goods, comes from, not merely if the price is right. And that means no business can afford to ignore the impacts their buying practices have on producers...

The greatest moral failing is to condemn something as a moral failing: no vice is worse than being judgmental.

Looking out over the port of Dover, with the endless steam of boats coming in and out, every British citizen is reminded that belonging here has never been about blood or genes. It’s simply about...

Society needs both justice and compassion, a head and a heart, if it is to be civilised.

We can take suffering to be an opportunity to learn and to grow. But if we are honest, we should remember that this is making the best of a bad job, and that minimising suffering...

Anger clearly has its proper place at work, which is neither wholly absent nor ever present. The manager who is an emotional blank is just as hard to work for as the volcanic boss, and...

The reason to be an atheist is not that it makes us feel better or gives us a more rewarding life. The reason to be an atheist is simply that there is no God and...

Instead of showing strangers kindness and giving them the benefit of the doubt, we increasingly show them only fear, and that is bad for us and them.

Seek first what is true and of value, and then whatever happiness follows will be of the appropriate quantity and, more importantly, quality.

The idea that there is a sharp boundary between our true inner selves and the outside world is pervasive but highly questionable. The boundaries of the self might well be more porous than we ordinarily...

Philosophy has to be enquiring; it can take nothing on faith, and its methods are based not on the blind acceptance of authority, but on establishing truths by reason and argument.

The mark of a mature, psychologically healthy mind is indeed the ability to live with uncertainty and ambiguity, but only as much as there really is. Uncertainty is no virtue when the facts are clear,...

One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive...

Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.

We can’t control whether we are rewarded for our endeavours, with cash or recognition. It is not up to us how much cash or time we get on Earth, but it is down to us...

No matter how convinced we are that someone is nasty, evil or just plain criminal, if they have not been convicted of any crime and support views that are upheld and defended by many law-abiding...

To become a stoic is to endorse the truthfulness of its world view and accept its prescription for how you ought to live, not just to like how it makes you feel.

You don’t choose what you believe moment to moment, but choices you have made do shape what you come to believe.