“We have tried to make a coherent set of recommendations wherever possible. But, where disagreements seemed deep, we have preferred to expose them, together with the reasons given on both sides, rather than to patch together some compromise. We think it contributes more to an understanding of the issues sometimes to present reasoned alternatives than to present an agreed position for which the real reason would be the need for unity rather than genuinely compelling arguments… Others will often disagree with our views. We hope that this will at least stimulate them to work out more fully and explicitly what their reasons are.”

“It is surely right to be predisposed in favour of anything that removes some of the barriers against homosexuals having a fulfilled family life. Lesbians who want to have children are not different in their needs from heterosexual women. Like many other women, lesbians may care about what adoption does not provide: having a child genetically theirs and to whom they give birth. They may care as much about having their children as an infertile wife, and their lives may be as much enriched by such children as anyone else’s.”

"When we think about the occupational purdah of women in Bangla Desh and Northern India, our response is to see it as a denial of basic human rights, as an injustice needing remedy. But thinking of the ecology of cultures may make us pause… If the effort to persuade is successful, our culture will again have defeated theirs. There can seem something unfair about the unequal contest, and something sad about the diminished human variety of its outcome. "Anyone with some anthropological sensitivity is likely to feel sympathy with this case for caution. But, on the other hand, many of us will still feel troubled by accepting the status quo. It is not readers of books on anthropology who pay the price for this cultural variety. It is paid in the Third World by women and their children who have too little to eat. The anthropological case pulls one way, but concern with misery and oppression pulls the other." (from my article The Research Programme of Development Ethics in this volume.)