Over The Past Three Decades, Markets And

I Think People Who Want To Use Genetic Technologies To Gain A Competitive Edge For Their Children Are Engaging In A Kind Of Overreaching That Could Really Undermine Our Appreciation Of Children As Gifts For Which We Should Be Grateful And, Instead, To View Them As Products Or Instruments That Are There To Be Molded And Directed.

One Of The Appeals Of Markets, As A Public Philosophy, Is They Seem To Spare Us The Need To Engage In Public Arguments About The Meaning Of Goods. So Markets Seem To Enable Us To Be Non-judgmental About Values. But I Think That's A Mistake.

Democracy Does Not Require Perfect Equality, But It Does Require That Citizens Share A Common Life. What Matters Is That People Of Different Backgrounds And Social Positions Encounter One Another, And Bump Up Against One Another, In The Course Of Ordinary Life.

Economics Has Increasingly Become The Science Of Human Behavior In General, And It's All The More Unlikely To Think That It Can Possibly Be Value-free - And, In Fact, It Isn't. Economics Rests On Un-argued Assumptions That Need To Be Examined.

My Argument Is Not That We Must Never Intervene In Nature. My Argument Is That There Is A Moral Difference Between Intervention For The Sake Of Health, To Cure Or Prevent Disease, And Intervention For The Sake Of Achieving A Competitive Edge For Our Kids In A Consumer Society.