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

I think very often when we think we are aiming at the best for our children, what we are really doing is trying to position them for competitive success in an intensely driven kind of society. I'm not sure that always leads to the good life or to happiness.

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.

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.

What intrigued me most was not the technology as such but the questions about the human goods, the fundamental human values and virtues that are raised by debates over biotechnology.

There are really exercises in a kind of consumerist ethic that I think don't have the same moral weight as medicine or health.

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.