If you were in your twenties now, with your career ahead of you, with the aim of trying to help the world in a big way, what would you do? In particular, what would you do differently to what you did in your twenties and why?
I’m not sure that I’d be a philosopher today. When I was in my twenties, practical ethics was virtually a new field, and there was a lot to be done. (Of course, it wasn’t really new, because philosophers had discussed practical issues from Plato onwards, but it had been neglected in the 20th century, so it seemed new.) Now there are many very good people working in practical ethics, and it is harder to have an impact. Perhaps I would become a full-time campaigner, either for effective altruism in general, or more specifically, against factory farming, which I see as a moral atrocity, producing suffering on a scale too vast for us to comprehend, and also terrible for the climate, the local and regional environment, and wasteful of the food we grow to feed the animals.
If you were in your twenties now, with your career ahead of you, with the aim of trying to help the world in a big way, what would you do? In particular, what would you do differently to what you did in your twenties and why?
I’m not sure that I’d be a philosopher today. When I was in my twenties, practical ethics was virtually a new field, and there was a lot to be done. (Of course, it wasn’t really new, because philosophers had discussed practical issues from Plato onwards, but it had been neglected in the 20th century, so it seemed new.) Now there are many very good people working in practical ethics, and it is harder to have an impact. Perhaps I would become a full-time campaigner, either for effective altruism in general, or more specifically, against factory farming, which I see as a moral atrocity, producing suffering on a scale too vast for us to comprehend, and also terrible for the climate, the local and regional environment, and wasteful of the food we grow to feed the animals.