Progress is more of a challenge for the cynic but also more important and urgent, since for the optimist things aren’t that bad and are bound to get better anyway.

Being virtuous is wonderful thing, but feeling virtuous is a shortcut to vice.

Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe that that the universe is governed by benign forces, at some point you have to explain why there is so much suffering, misfortune and misery in the world.

I don’t believe in God because certain reasons and arguments weigh more heavily in my mind than others, not because I have willfully decided to reject my creator, as many religious people seem to think....

Many people are never happier than when they get the opportunity to complain, while others are deeply unhappy with how things are but just accept the fact. Complaint occurs when we refuse to accept that...

Atheists have to live with the knowledge that there is no salvation, no redemption, no second chances. Lives can go terribly wrong in ways that can never be put right.

It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient.

The optimist underestimates how difficult it is to achieve real change, believing that anything is possible and it’s possible now. Only by confronting head-on the reality that all progress is going to be obstructed by...

The capacity to make free choices is not something we either have entirely or not at all. Rather, choices become freer the more they are the result of our own capacity to reflect on and...

Trade has played a vital role in the social evolution of humankind. It allowed people to specialise, which raises both skill levels and efficiency. It brought people from different lands together, co-operating rather than competing...

Love is indeed, at root, the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones.

Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I’m tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university,...

Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy’s pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed...

The supposed revelations of God to humanity through Christ, or the word of God to Mohammed through the angel Gabriel, had the power they did because they indicated new truths, new directions for followers.

Being able and willing to complain is what makes us rational and moral animals, capable of seeing and articulating the difference between how things are and how they should be.

No one who has understood even a fraction of what science has told us about the universe can fail to be in awe of both the cosmos and of science.

‘That which does not kill me makes me stronger’ is not a law of the universe. What it can be, if we so choose, is a resolution.

Trying to keep up with health advice can feel like surfing the Net for weather forecasts: what you find is always changing, often contradictory and rarely encouraging.

If you believe you are right, then you should believe that you can make the case that you’re right. This requires you to deal with serious objections properly.

You should protest about the views of people you disagree with over major moral issues, and argue them down, but you should not try to silence them, however repugnant you find them. That is the...

It is often said that having gone through any kind of suffering tends to makes you appreciate life more and live more in the present. I’m not sure how universal or long-lasting these effects really...

I don’t think anyone who genuinely embraced sincerity, charity and modesty could be intolerant or divisive.

The only good reason to embrace a philosophical position is that you are convinced it is true or at least makes sense of the world better than the alternatives.

Perhaps the biggest myth about cynicism is that it deepens with age. I think what really happens is that experience painfully rips away layers of scales from our eyes, and so we do indeed become...

Big sporting events and spectacles might give the national morale a shot in the arm, but they are too transient and taste-specific to stand as robust symbols of nationhood.

Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

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...