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I am trying to get at the moral arguments and the ethical status of various attempts at enhancement, or genetic engineering, or the bid for designer children. But there are implications for society at large.

Michael Sandel

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Michael Sandel
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: May 3
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Political Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Michael J. Sandel
Michael Joseph Sandel
Argument
Implications
Large
Attempts
Moral
Arguments
Society
Engineering
Children
Status
Trying
Ethical
Designer
Enhancement
Various
Genetic

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To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
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A better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter.
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It's possible to make sense of what's morally at stake in an appreciation of the gift of life, or the gift of a child, without necessarily presupposing that there is a giver. What matters is that the gift - in this case, the child - not be wholly our own doing, our own product.
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I grew up in a Jewish family, and we have raised our children in a Jewish tradition. Religion gives a framework for moral enquiry in young minds and points us to questions beyond the material.
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The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.
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It's ultimately the purpose of education to cultivate the love of learning for its own sake.
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Human beings are empowered to exercise dominion over nature and even to be participants in creation and yet, at the same time, there are strictures against idolatry, which is a kind of overreaching and confusing human beings' role with God's.
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When I arrived at Harvard, I wanted to design a course in political theory that would have interested me, back when I was started out, in a way that the standard things didn't.
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In some parts of the world, that sex selection for boys - and it's usually for boys - reflects sex discrimination against girls, and it leads to very large imbalances - in China, in Korea, in India - in the population between boys and girls, a vast disproportion of boys to girls, and it reflects really this discriminatory attitude toward girls.
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Self-knowledge is like lost innocence however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
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The other effect that I worry about is the effect on the parent, that the moral teaching of humility and of the limits to our control that parenthood teaches- - that that will be lost and that we will begin to think of children more as consumer goods than as gifts that we can't fully control and for which we aren't fully responsible.
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I think too often in our society parents, who may have good impulses, overreach and try to mold and shape and direct their child.
Michael Sandel
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The majority of American states had laws by the 1930s that allowed for forced sterilization of socially undesirable categories of people, so-called feeble-minded, for example, and with Hitler culminating in genocide.
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It is true that the Jewish tradition emphasizes the moral mandate to save life. It also has a different position from the Catholic Church on the moral status of the embryo. It has a more developmental view of when human life, in the sense of personhood, begins than does the Catholic Church.
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Most economics that is taught in college and universities today projects itself as a value-neutral science. This claim has always been open to question, but I think it's especially in doubt today.
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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.
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Very often when we aim at the best, or what we may think is the best for our children, we aim really at lesser things, such as getting into a certain college.
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Aiming at giving our kids a competitive edge in a consumer society - that, in principle, is a goal that is limitless.
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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.
Michael Sandel
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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.
Michael Sandel