Is It Naive to Side With Democracy?

A friend worries that my support of the politics of consent over the politics of imposing general standards may make me hopelessly utopian. He analogizes my position to that of someone who might say, “I want to create a world where there is no homophobia so that we don’t have to ban biotechnologies that could be used in a homophobic manner.” To such a sentiment he proposes the intervention: “[S]ince it is impossible to create such a world, isn’t it more pragmatic to ban some potentially homophobic uses of technologies?”