Many people object to genetically engineered (GE) food because they believe that it is unnatural or that its creation amounts to playing God. These objections are often referred to as intrinsic objections, and they have been widely criticized in the agricultural bioethics literature as being unsound, incompatible with modern science, religious, inchoate, and based on emotion instead of reason. Many of their critics also argue that even if these objections did have some merit as ethical objections, their quasi-religious nature means that they are entirely irrelevant when interpreted as political objections regarding what public policy ought to be. In this paper, we argue that this widespread view is false. Intrinsic objections have much more political import than has previously been recognized, and indeed the requirements of political liberalism and its associated idea of liberal neutrality, once properly understood, protect intrinsic objections from many of the most common objections. That is, policy-makers may not legitimately base public policy on grounds that are inconsistent with intrinsic objections, even when they believe those objections to be flawed in the ways mentioned above. This means that in the context of a political debate about GE food, the discussion should not center on the substantive merits of the intrinsic objections themselves but rather on the appropriate political norms for achieving democratically legitimate policy on issues that touch people's deepest religious and moral beliefs.

Background: In the World Health Report 2000, the World Health Organization made the controversial choice to measure inequality across individuals rather than across groups, the standard in the field. This choice has been widely discussed and criticized.

Health inequalities are of concern both because studying them may help one learn how to improve health and because health inequalities may be unjust. This paper argues that attending to these reasons why health inequalities may be important undercuts the claims of researchers at the World Health Organization in favor of focusing on individual health variation rather than on social group health differences. Inequalities in individual health are of little interest unless one goes on to study how they are related to other factors.