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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.

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
Children
Humility
Genetic
Kind
Ambition
Regarding
Road
Parenting
Worry
Accustomed
Less
Choosing
Desire
Traits
Become
Desires
School
Instruments

More quotes by Michael Sandel

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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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Self-knowledge is like lost innocence however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
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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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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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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.
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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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The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to Aristotle. The real difficulty begins with figuring out who deserves what and why.
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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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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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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.
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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.
Michael Sandel
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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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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
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The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be
Michael Sandel
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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 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
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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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You can't go wrong with fish and chips.
Michael Sandel
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To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
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.
Michael Sandel