There's no necessary connection between maximizing social utility or economic wealth and creating a flourishing democracy. The first does not guarantee the second. The only way to create a flourishing democracy is to find ways to reason together about the big questions, including hard questions about justice and the common good, to reason together about these questions so that we as citizens can decide how to shape the forces that govern our lives.

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.

Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.

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."

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.

The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be

I think too often in our society parents, who may have good impulses, overreach and try to mold and shape and direct their child.