I came across this book while thinking about modern philosophy/ethics writers I’d appreciated before. I read a few of his books several years ago, The Meaning of Things, having a particular impact on me as a guide for applying philosophy to life. His argument for vegetarianism “You’re eating carrion!” has especially rattled around in my head ever since. I was also reading Alain de Botton around the same time and it’s interesting to see how they’ve grown in different ways,de Botton with his “atheist church” while Grayling has become a little more “big-picture”.

Reading this book against the backdrop of a rapidly changing geo-political landscape where, to paraphrase the book, international treaties rely on voluntary compliance and how one bad actor can just upend all that gave this book more importance than it might have done last year.

It makes a brief, but fierce critique of the toothlessness of expecting everyone to just be good when we talk about “the commons” (in the economics meaning of the word). The world is, at an international level, built on anarchy. States are expected to self-organise and behave themselves, which just feels like a naive belief, especially when looking at how we’ve all worked together historically. This book dismantles that in 224 pages.

Companies and countries own self-interests have ruined shared resources before and if we’re not careful, they’ll do the same to something as fundamental to the human experience as the moon.

Well worth reading, especially right now as the world shakes itself into something new.