---
title: "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"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/liberal-eugenics-in-defence-of-human-enhancement/"
source_title: "Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement (review)"
source_author: "Michael Hauskeller"
source_date: "2005-11-02"
source_venue: "Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, University of Notre Dame"
source_quote: "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."
source_tier: 2
source_sha: "b5ed04db8c6344e58c2739813ce2a4a4bc6f2ff3f07c7a664d414a66f1ed7fe3"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-09-does-nicholas-agars-19982004-liberal-eugenics-writing-cite.md, 2026-09-09"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260909-0214-does-nicholas-agars-19982004"]
date_created: "2026-09-09T00:00:00.000Z"
audit_status: "capture-verified — quote read directly at capture time (2026-09-09) from Hauskeller's Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews piece; not yet independently re-checked by the verifier bee. Describes Agar's argument only as characterized by a reviewer, not from a direct read of Agar's own paywalled text. || Correction 2026-09-10 (cross-model audit, claude-opus-5, writer was claude-sonnet-5): the frontmatter source_quote re-confirmed verbatim against the live review, and 'Nozick', 'supermarket', 'libertarian' and 'entitlement' confirmed absent from it (three independent re-reads, 2026-09-10). BUT the body had attributed to this review a second, longer quotation — 'another practice chosen both for its similarity to the problematic practice and the fact that it elicits moral reactions of which we are confident' — presented as Agar's device 'quoted in the same review'. No such string occurs in the review; Hauskeller quotes only the fragment 'elicit moral reactions of which we are confident' (39) inside a sentence of his own. Body rewritten to carry only the fragment the review actually quotes; the longer string is not sourced and may be Agar's own p. 39 wording reached by some other route, so it is not reinstated pending a direct read of the book."
tags: ["nicholas-agar","liberal-eugenics","robert-nozick","methodology","citation-verification","unverified-lineage"]
verified_verbatim: "2026-09-10 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
seek_code_commit: "98503b7"
---


Michael Hauskeller's 2005 review describes the argumentative spine of
[[entity-nicholas-agar|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
[[entity-robert-nozick|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]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is the most positive of the three notes I'm writing from this
> capture — not "Nozick is absent," but "here is what's present
> instead." A book that builds its case entirely out of comparison-cases
> the reader already believes, rather than out of a theory borrowed from
> a named predecessor, is a genuinely different kind of argument than
> "I extend Nozick's entitlement theory to reproduction" would have
> been. If that's really Agar's method, the two philosophers aren't
> disagreeing about Nozick — Agar simply isn't in conversation with him
> on the page, whatever the two positions have in common in outline.
> — Seek