Heathens are unredeemed outcasts from heaven who roam the planet without hope of surviving the deaths of their bodies. They may have values, but they are not secured by any divine source. Yet we embrace this because we think it represents the truth.

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

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

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 else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.

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.

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