There Is A Tendency To Think That

If We Go Too Far Down The Road Of Choosing The Genetic Traits Of Children, My Worry Is That Parenting Will Be Less A Kind Of School For Humility Than It Should Be, And We Will Become Too Accustomed To Regarding Children As Instruments Of Our Ambition And Of Our Desires.

I Would Include Non-medical Sex Selection As One Of Those Practices That I Think Is Morally Questionable And That Can Carry Adverse Social Consequences.

Other Animals Can Make Sounds, And Sounds Can Indicate Pleasure And Pain. But Language, A Distinctly Human Capacity, Isn´t Just For Registering Pleasure And Pain. It´s About Declaring What Is Just And What Is Unjust, And Distinguishing Right From Wrong. We Don´t Grasp These Things Silently, And Then Put Words To Them; Language Is The Medium Through Which We Discern And Deliberate About The Good.

One Of The Ways In Which Parenting Is A Learning Experience And An Opportunity For Moral Growth Is That We Learn As Parents That We Don't Choose The Kind Of Child That We Have.

If You Go Back To Adam Smith, You Find The Idea That Markets And Market Forces Operate As An Invisible Hand. This Is The Traditional Laissez-faire Market Idea. But Today, When Economics Is Increasingly Defined As The Science Of Incentive, It Becomes Clear That The Use Of Incentives Involves Quite Active Intervention, Either By An Economist Or A Policy Maker, In Using Financial Inducements To Motivate Behavior. In Fact, So Much Though That We Now Almost Take For Granted That Incentives Are Central To The Subject Of Economics.