A market economy is a tool - a valuable and effective tool - for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavour. It's a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.

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.

What I really want for my children is that they be loved and that they be happy and that they lead a good life.

My goal is first of all to promote a public debate about where markets serve the public good and where they don't belong. That's my first goal.

If parents are aiming at choosing children who will be good athletes, or great musicians, or who will get into Ivy League schools, or who will be tall enough to make the basketball team, then there is a danger that the life of the child will bear the burden of that expectation; and the risk of disappointment and the cost of disappointment will be even higher than they are now, and even now they can be considerable.

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.

Parental love is not contingent on the talents and attributes the child happens to have. We choose our friends and spouses at least partly on the basis of qualities we find attractive. But we do not choose our children. Their qualities are unpredictable, and even the most conscientious parents cannot be held wholly responsible for the kind of child they have. That is why parenthood, more than other human relationships, teaches what the theologian William F. May calls an “openness to the unbidden.