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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.

Ophelia Benson talks about Why Truth Matters on Point of Inquiry Podcast

Point of Inquiry has just released a 25 minute interview with Ophelia Benson (you can listen to it here). Ophelia runs the excellent Butterflies and Wheels website and is co-author with Jeremy Stangroom of Why Truth Matters and the Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense. In a wide-ranging discussion she explains why truth is so important, why we owe it to our children not to mislead them, the dangers of anti-intellectualism, and why literary theorists are so often snappy dressers and  mathematicians generally aren't. This is part of an ongoing series of Point of Inquiry podcasts that you can subscribe to via iTunes.

Read Ophelia's earlier interview on Virtual Philosopher

Raymond Tallis' Annoying Choice of Book for Desert Island Discs

Raymond Tallis, (physician, philosopher, poet) is a model of good sense on the value of  science and what's wrong with pseudo-science and anti-science as for example in the podcast linked from his Times article.

He also won many hearts some time ago with his brilliantly titled Not Saussure which savaged trendy literary theory. On Radio 4's Desert Island Discs repeated today, his clarity and intelligence shone through particularly on medical issues about dying, and his choice of music included two bullseyes: Bach's Cello Suites, and Schubert's String Quintet.

But the deep mystery to me is why his choice of book for his hypothetical desert island soujourn was Heidgegger's Being and Time - one of the most obscure books of the twentieth century, which, though it obviously does contain some interesting ideas, buries them so deep in verbiage and neologisms that only the full time scholar has a chance of excavating them or making anything remotely comprehensible out of them (and for a sceptical reader like me there is the constant suspicion of being conned by deliberate obscurantism and even the philosophical equivalent of homeopathy). I suppose it is like taking a fiendishly difficult cryptic crossword on a long journey...I wish he'd opted for something by David Hume or Friedrich Nietzsche. Surely it would be better to take something by an undoubted genius such as either of these two (both whom were also superb writers) than a doorstop by someone who definitely couldn't write and probably wasn't a genius.