Quote

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.

Michael Sandel

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Michael Sandel
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: May 3
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Political Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Michael J. Sandel
Michael Joseph Sandel
Less
Choosing
Desire
Traits
Become
Desires
School
Instruments
Children
Humility
Genetic
Kind
Ambition
Regarding
Road
Parenting
Worry
Accustomed

More quotes by Michael Sandel

Image
To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
Michael Sandel
Image
Aiming at giving our kids a competitive edge in a consumer society - that, in principle, is a goal that is limitless.
Michael Sandel
Image
Self-knowledge is like lost innocence however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
Michael Sandel
Image
I do not argue that nature is sacrosanct in the sense that we must never tamper with nature. That would disempower, really, all of medicine. That would mean that we can't combat dread diseases - malaria, polio, all of which are given by nature, if one thinks about it.
Michael Sandel
Image
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
Image
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.
Michael Sandel
Image
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.
Michael Sandel
Image
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.
Michael Sandel
Image
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.
Michael Sandel
Image
I think the reason we might hesitate to pay cash to students for doing well on tests or getting good grades or reading books is that we sense that the monetary payment is an extrinsic reward.
Michael Sandel
Image
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.
Michael Sandel
Image
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.
Michael Sandel
Image
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.
Michael Sandel
Image
I'm a supporter of embryonic stem cell research. I do think there are very important moral and also religious questions at stake in the debate over embryonic stem cell research.
Michael Sandel
Image
There are some religious traditions that view human beings as participants in creation. This is true of the Jewish tradition, from which I come.
Michael Sandel
Image
Parenthood is a school for humility. We can't choose the precise traits of our children, and that is morally important. It teaches us what William May, a theologian whom I greatly admire, calls an openness to the unbidden.
Michael Sandel
Image
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.
Michael Sandel
Image
Some parents expend great efforts to get their kids into the right nursery school or the right preschool, with the thought that that will set them on the path to success, to competitive success especially.
Michael Sandel
Image
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
Image
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.
Michael Sandel