In Most Of Our Lives, We Are

Democracy Does Not Require Perfect Equality, But It Does Require That Citizens Share A Common Life. What Matters Is That People Of Different Backgrounds And Social Positions Encounter One Another, And Bump Up Against One Another, In The Course Of Ordinary Life.

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.

Economics Has Increasingly Become The Science Of Human Behavior In General, And It's All The More Unlikely To Think That It Can Possibly Be Value-free - And, In Fact, It Isn't. Economics Rests On Un-argued Assumptions That Need To Be Examined.

First, Individual Rights Cannot Be Sacrificed For The Sake Of The General Good, And Second, The Principles Of Justice That Specify These Rights Cannot Be Premised On Any Particular Vision Of The Good Life. What Justifies The Rights Is Not That They Maximize The General Welfare Or Otherwise Promote The Good, But Rather That They Comprise A Fair Framework Within Which Individuals And Groups Can Choose Their Own Values And Ends, Consistent With A Similar Liberty For Others.

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.