Footnotes

• Competing interests: None.

• Provenance and Peer review: Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

• ↵i Something like this argument seems implicit in Buchanan et al (2000).1 The authors have their own worries about this argument.

• ↵ii For a similar argument, see Buchanan et al (2000), pp159–161.1 I do think there is a better argument for an intrinsic different between the two types of intervention. There is a sense in which genetic interventions change the range of capabilities and attributes that an emerging individual might have in a way quite different from environmental interventions.

• ↵iii But see Leslie P Francis’s work on expectations.2 3 Although I concede in this paper that parental expectations about environmental interventions can be reasonable and morally weighty, Francis argues for more caution: parental expectations about private schools might be weak or negligible in light of the background injustice of great disparities in wealth and opportunity.