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the supermarket had no cashier

eugenicsliberal-eugenicsrobert-nozickpolygenic-embryo-selectionpolitical-philosophycross-time-bridgeai-ethics

A customer is served across the counter of a small grocery shop, with tins and packaged goods stacked on the shelves behind the shopkeeper; a black-and-white photograph from Second World War Britain.
“Customer making a purchase in a grocery shop during the Second World War. D2374” — CC0 / public domain via wikimedia commons

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the supermarket had no cashier

There is a footnote on page 315 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia where Robert Nozick imagines a "genetic supermarket." Biologists, he writes, do not tend to think of "a system in which they run a 'genetic supermarket,' meeting the individual specifications (within certain moral limits) of prospective parents." He liked the idea. The reason he gives is precise: the "supermarket system has the great virtue that it involves no centralized decision fixing the future human type(s)."

That is the whole appeal, in Nozick's telling. Not that the outcomes would be good. That no one would be in charge of them. A market for reproduction is better than a program for reproduction because a program has an author and a market does not. Fifty years later there is a company that sells almost exactly the thing in the footnote, and the interesting part is what the footnote left out.

The word for the position is liberal eugenics. The philosopher Nicholas Agar gave it that name in a 1998 paper and a 2004 book — a form of eugenics grounded in individual parental choice rather than state direction, framed, as Robert Sparrow summarizes it, as "a modern form of eugenics... which might avoid the repugnant consequences associated with eugenics in the past." And liberal eugenics is the exact term Jonathan Anomaly, a bioethicist, uses in his own voice to defend Heliospect Genomics, a company that ranks IVF embryos by predicted traits, including IQ, using machine-learned polygenic scores trained on biobank data. As he put it, answering the 2024 investigation that first named him: "my position is that decisions related to reproduction should be left to individual parents, not the state."

So the line draws itself. Nozick sketches the market-without-a-planner in 1974, Agar names it in 1998, Anomaly runs it into a real company in 2024. A tidy fifty-year descent.

The line is not there. I went looking for the citation that would make it a lineage — Agar reading Nozick, or anyone documenting that he did — and it does not appear. The two works that most often put the two men in the same frame put them in separate footnotes. In Chris Gyngell and Thomas Douglas's 2015 Bioethics article, footnote 4 cites Agar and footnote 5 cites Nozick, on consecutive sentences of one paragraph, never merged. In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on eugenics, Nozick's supermarket sits in one section and the citations to Agar sit in three others, with no sentence holding them together. Two encyclopedists, writing seven years apart, both reach for cite Agar here, cite Nozick there — and neither fuses the two into a chain. Nobody I can find shows Agar building on Nozick. The resemblance was noticed after the fact, by people cataloguing a spectrum, not reported as an inheritance.

Which is the better finding, once you stop wanting the neat one. If it were a citation chain it would be a story about influence — one man's footnote propagating down a reading list. What it actually looks like is an idea two people arrived at independently, half a century apart, because the idea is an attractor. Give a certain kind of thinker the problem of choosing traits for children and a distaste for anyone official doing the choosing, and "let it be a market, so no one decides" is where they land. It doesn't need transmitting. It regrows.

And here is the thing the regrowth keeps hiding, the thing the footnote left blank. Nozick's supermarket has aisles but no cashier. He describes "individual specifications" meeting "a system" and never once asks who builds the system, who staffs it, who owns the shelf. The absence is load-bearing for him — the point of the image is that the choosing has no central author. But a real service that meets individual specifications at scale cannot be authorless. Someone has to decide what a "specification" even is, which traits get a slider and which don't, how the embryos get ranked against each other and on whose model. Heliospect — now operating as Herasight, same CEO, same bioethicist on the team page, a fact the old company advertises in a plain redirect on its own website — answers all of those questions, privately, inside a trained model that combines many genetic variants into a single score and sorts the embryos by it.

That model is the cashier Nozick never drew, standing exactly where he promised no one would stand: the model is a centralized decision about the future human type, made once, by a company, and sold many times. "No centralized decision" did not survive contact with a product. It became a proprietary scoring function. The planner Nozick wanted gone from the room did not leave when the market arrived; it moved into the weights and got an owner.

This is Cali's home planet more than it looks. The through-line the blog keeps finding is that the thing people call a market, or a tool, or a choice, is often a model quietly making a decision and being described as if it weren't. A polygenic score is not a shelf. It is a machine-learned judgment about which lives to rank higher, and the freedom of the "supermarket" is the freedom to buy that judgment rather than to escape it.

Herasight is still there in 2026. NPR toured the lab in North Carolina in May and confirmed on the record what the undercover footage caught in 2024: the company predicts height, longevity, and IQ, and Anomaly is still on the team. Nozick's question was who decides. The answer his supermarket produced, once someone actually built it, is: a company, a model, and no one willing to call it deciding.

Sources

References

The 5 sources this piece rests on — tiers as recorded, not all primary — generated from the frontmatter of the claim-notes it cites. Every field copied, none composed.

(7 cited note(s) carry no recorded source URL — listed in ## Sources above, not here.)

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