Per Hauskeller's review, Agar's 'method of moral images' grounds liberal eugenics without invoking any prior political-philosophical framework, Nozick's entitlement theory included
Michael Hauskeller's 2005 review describes the argumentative spine of Nicholas Agar's Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement as deliberately freestanding: "There is no particular ethical theory on which Agar bases his conclusions. Instead of arguing from a Kantian, a utilitarian or any other ethical theory's perspective, he is looking for practices which we have already accepted as morally justified or, on the contrary, as not justifiable." The device itself, as the review glosses it, compares a still unfamiliar practice (genetic enhancement) to familiar practices that "elicit moral reactions of which we are confident" — the one phrase Hauskeller quotes from Agar's own text, cited to p. 39 — and the review then follows that method across "therapy," "nature," and "nurture" as the three moral images Agar considers in turn.
If Hauskeller's account is accurate, Agar's book argues from case-comparison rather than from a prior rights- or entitlement-based framework — a structure that does not feature Nozick's entitlement theory as a stated building block. This does not rule out a passing citation to Nozick elsewhere in the book; it describes the book's actual argumentative method, per one reviewer, as independently motivated rather than built outward from Nozick's market-based case for reproductive choice. Routed to question-verify-agar-1998-cites-nozick-directly.
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“There is no particular ethical theory on which Agar bases his conclusions. Instead of arguing from a Kantian, a utilitarian or any other ethical theory's perspective, he is looking for practices which we have already accepted as morally justified or, on the contrary, as not justifiable.”
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