Sublime

ethics is about responding not to human beings in general but to human beings in particular—and in all their particularity.

The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. I wrote this book because I have come to realize that it is not. More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense.

"(Genetic engineering) faces our society with problems unprecedented, not only in the history of science, but of life on the Earth. It places in human hands the capacity to redesign living organisms, the products of some three billion years of evolution.... Up to now, living organisms have evolved very slowly, and new forms have had plenty of

“You know how to split atoms, how to send explorers to the moon, how to splice genes, but you don’t know how people ought to live.”

The secular argument for human freedom, launched almost three centuries ago under the rubric of “natural rights,” has often been reduced to a calculation of probabilities: democracy and the personal freedoms it protects are good not because they have an inherent moral superiority over other forms of organizing society, but because they are the leas

The key question for Lippmann wasn’t whether the average person was intelligent enough to make decisions about public policy; it was whether the average person could ever know enough to choose intelligently.

Medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered.