Book Review: Michael Sandel -The Case Against Perfection

Biotechnology is opening up many possibilities. Athletes will soon be able to choose to inject substances that will produce genetic modifications that will dramatically improve their performance; parents will be able to specify many genetically controlled qualities for their offspring. This is not the world our parents and grandparents inhabited. How should we treat these developments?

In his short, highly-readable book The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, Michael Sandel comes out firmly against the pursuit of perfection by genetic enhancement. He, of course, defends biotechnical solutions to medical problems. It is when we attempt to ehance ourselves and others genetically that he objects.

Much of his argument turns on his notion of 'giftedness'. An athlete, for example, has a natural genetic endowment. According to Sandel, to go beyond this 'gift' is a kind of hubris on our part, a Promethean project that involves playing God. This sounds like a theological position. But Sandel believes his reasoning should have force with secularists too.

For Sandel there are three features of our moral landscape that will be transformed if we succumb to this desire to play God:

1. Humility. We will lose the sense of reverence that is appropriate to our fate. Instead we will end up acting with hubris towards our nature.

2. Responsibility. With increases in choice about what we are, responsibility explodes. The consequence will be burdensome.

3. Perhaps most important, though, is solidarity. Sandel believes that the price of enhancement would be a loss of human solidarity. Once we lose the sense that we are subject to contingencies of fate, the successful will, even more than now, see themselves as self-made.

Sandel's message is clear:

Rather than employ our new genetic powers to straighten 'the crooked timber of humanity,' we should do what we can to create social and political arrangements more hospitable to the gifts and limitations of imperfect human beings (p. 97)

Much of Sandel's argument will appeal to religious believers, particularly those who seek humility before God's will. But for atheists and agnostics, this may be harder to stomach. Why not improve ourselves if we can? Think of how wonderful it would be if we could increase the number of geniuses per capita, particularly if we could give them a compassion gene and a desire to improve the lot of humanity...In the area of sport much of Sandel's argument turns on his belief that watching bionic athletes slugging it out would become mere spectacle, and that part of what we value in sport is the limitations of the athletes. I'm not so sure about this. I'd like to watch a football match in which every player achieved the skill level of George Best or Maradonna. And watching the top marathon runners today is already like watching bionic athletes, but no less absorbing for us mere mortals.

Whether or not Sandel is right about these issues, this is a clear, entertaining and stimulating book about a topic that matters. Underlying it are major questions about what we value and why that any thinking person will want to address.

Comments

[Peter Coville]

Hmmm it seems to me that you could be brushing away Sandel's arguments just a little lightly. Of course, saying that "much of Sandel's argument will appeal to religious believers" is a way of discrediting Sandel's arguments rather too easily, in the firm knowledge that the majority of your readers will be atheists/agnostics. More importantly though - and I don't know whether Sandel himself criticizes genetic perfectionism in precisely these terms - isn't it true that much of human achievement, whether it be sporting, ethical, emotional or other, does take its significance from the (present) fact that human nature sets limitations on action? One doesn't need to be a religious believer to hold this view. Much of great human culture relies on the assumption that human nature is fixed and limited, hence its universal appeal. Think of Shakespeare's characters struggling with mortality, ambition and jealousy. Perhaps the extent of our limitations - including the central one: mortality - are such that we've got nothing much to worry about from genetic manipulation, for the time being at least. And perhaps gripping onto the comforter of human nature is the last form of conservatism, which will need to be overcome and left behind, as a childish thing in the life story of the species. Yet throwing overboard "the given" as it is expressed in human culture, whether religious or artistic, and effacing the distinction between nature - as what is given - and culture - as what humans might change, would at least seem to merit a debate!

[Ali]

Well I am a Muslim and I don't see how I could justify refraining from becoming more perfect. Did God not create us to become more like Him?

And why on Earth do so many believers use the phrase "playing God"? How can anyone ever play God?