One of the most important things we can do as philosophers is to inculcate a love of truth in others. To show people the good aspects of a life that it's committed to truth — that it's not a life of just interminable argument and frustration, but that it's got things that are really meaningful and wonderful that you wouldn't have if you're just willing to to stay totally entrapped by lies.

I think that we really do need to check our intentions when we come into truth-seeking conversations in disagreement and really make sure that we're in a position where we were seeking the truth rather than just a more subtle or sophisticated form of power over another person. And even really well-meaning, ethical people can, at the end of the day, just want to control other people and not care about the truth.

In a kind of communications-focused culture — democratic cultures, like ours — it's very easy for truth to become just this tool of persuasion and rhetoric and for us to get so distracted by that that we forget that the other, the real truth, the philosophical truth, is something that's really difficult to attain, that requires a great deal of humility.

For me, in my life as a philosopher, one of the ways that I've given myself the confidence to go after some of these really hard questions in moral philosophy or in metaphysics is by having faith that God is going to meet me at the end of it. Whatever the truth is that I'm ultimately seeking after, it's good.

We think about the truth as something that belongs to an exclusive group or something that's always going to be way too difficult and requires a lot of specialization. And it's not.