Robert Nozick's 1974 *Anarchy, State, and Utopia* proposes a free-market "genetic supermarket" for reproductive choice, valued because no central authority fixes the future human type

robert-nozickgenetic-supermarketpolitical-philosophyeugenicslibertarianismfirst-encounter-term

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974, p. 315, the "A Framework for Utopia" chapter), Robert Nozick imagines biologists running "a system in which they run a 'genetic supermarket,' meeting the individual specifications (within certain moral limits) of prospective parents." He argues this "supermarket system has the great virtue that it involves no centralized decision fixing the future human type(s)" — the value of the arrangement, for Nozick, is precisely the absence of any state or expert committee deciding what humans should become. The claim is read directly from the primary text (Tier 1) and both quoted phrases were individually confirmed against the extracted PDF.

The footnote is a thought experiment inside a broader libertarian argument about utopia-as-framework, not a proposal Nozick develops at length or returns to elsewhere in the book. It predates the term "liberal eugenics" by roughly a quarter century and predates any working AI-driven embryo-selection service (see claim-heliospect-genomics-used-ai-polygenic-scoring-to-rank-embryos-by-iq) by exactly fifty years.