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.

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

I have a broad but not an expert or scholarly background in the Jewish tradition. I’ve tried to learn what I can from childhood, but I am not an expert on Jewish teachings.

There is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics, that’s a recipe for disagreement, and for that matter, a recipe for intolerance and coercion.

One of the ways in which parenting is a learning experience and an opportunity for moral growth is that we learn as parents that we don’t choose the kind of child that we have.

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.

Aiming at giving our kids a competitive edge in a consumer society – that, in principle, is a goal that is limitless.

In most of our lives, we are accustomed to aiming at mastery and control and dominion- – over nature, over our lives, over our jobs, over our careers, over the goods that we buy.

The norm of unconditional parental love, I think, depends on the fact that we don’t pick and choose the traits of our children in the way that we pick and choose the features of a car we might order, or a consumer good.

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.