Tinkering With Humans

Book review of The Case Against Perfection by Michael J. Sandel

Three years ago in The Atlantic, the Harvardphilosopher Michael Sandel wrote a critique of genetic engineeringtitled “The Case Against Perfection.” Now he has turned it into a book.The title is the same, but the text has changed, and sections have beenadded. That’s what human beings do. We try to improve things.

Sandel worries that this urge to improve can get us into trouble.Steroids, growth hormones, genetic engineering and other enhancements“pose a threat to human dignity” and “diminish our humanity,” heargues. That’s the way ethicists talk: things are good or bad, human orinhuman. The book’s subtitle encapsulates this project: “Ethics in theAge of Genetic Engineering.” But genetic engineering is too big forethics. It changes human nature, and with it, our notions of good andbad. It even changes our notions of perfection. The problem withperfection in the age of self-transformation isn’t that it’s bad. Theproblem is that it’s incoherent.

Sandel’s critique is refreshingly sophisticated. Opponents ofeugenic technologies usually complain that they’re unsafe, coercive,exploitative, nontherapeutic or unavailable to the poor. Sandel rebutsthese objections, pointing out that they’re selectively applied and canbe technically resolved. His deeper worry is that some kinds ofenhancement violate the norms embedded in human practices. Baseball,for example, is supposed to develop and celebrate an array of talents.Steroids warp the game. Parents are supposed to cultivate childrenthrough unconditional as well as conditional love. Selecting a baby’ssex betrays that relationship.

How do we know these norms exist? Because when they’re violated,something in us rebels. When parents choose their children’s sex, werecoil. When baseball players use steroids, we frown. We, the audience,embody and express the norm.

But audiences, too, can change. Look what happened to Broadwaymusicals. Thanks to sound amplification, “audiences inevitably grewless alert, more passive,” Sandel observes. Musicals became lessverbally clever, but we no longer cared. We were “rehabituated.” Sandellaments this, but it’s not clear why. If everything has changed—thepractice, the audience, the norms—what basis for complaint remains?

When norms change, you can always find old fogeys who grouse thatthings aren’t the way they used to be. In the case of football, Sandelfinds a retired N.F.L. player to support his contention that today’sbulked-up linemen are “degrading to the game” and to players’“dignity.” But eventually, the old fogeys die out, and the new normssolidify. Sandel recalls a scene from the movie Chariots of Fire,set in the years before the 1924 Olympics, in which a runner wasrebuked for using a coach. Supposedly, this violated the spirit ofamateur competition. Today, nobody blinks at running coaches. Thestandpoint from which people used to find them unseemly is gone.

To defend the old ways against the new, Sandel needs somethingdeeper: a common foundation for the various norms in sports, arts andparenting. He thinks he has found it in the idea of giftedness. To somedegree, being a good parent, athlete or performer is about acceptingand cherishing the raw material you’ve been given to work with.Strengthen your body, but respect it. Challenge your child, but loveher. Celebrate nature. Don’t try to control everything.

Why should we accept our lot as a gift? Because the loss of suchreverence would change our moral landscape. “If genetic engineeringenabled us to override the results of the genetic lottery,” Sandelworries, we might lose “our capacity to see ourselves as sharing acommon fate.” Moreover, “if bioengineering made the myth of the‘self-made man’ come true, it would be difficult to view our talents asgifts for which we are indebted rather than achievements for which weare responsible.”

Well, yes. In such a world, it would be hard to see ourselves asslaves to the genetic lottery or to a common fate because thatperception would no longer be true. But why defend a perception againsta truth? It’s a particularly awkward posture for a philosopher likeSandel, who infers norms and virtues from the way people live. Oncegene therapy becomes routine, the case against genetic engineering willsound as quaint as the case against running coaches.

If the genetic lottery were better than the self-made man, we mightprefer the old truth to the new one. But Sandel’s egalitarian fatalismalready feels a bit 20th-century. The older half of me shares hisdismay that some parents feel blamed for carrying babies with Downsyndrome to term. But my younger half cringes at his flight from the“burden of decision” and “explosion of responsibility” that come withour expanding genetic power. Given a choice between a world of fate andblamelessness and a world of freedom and responsibility, I’ll take thelatter. Such a world may be, as Sandel says, too daunting for thehumans of today. But not for the humans of tomorrow.

Sandel thinks this vision of freedom is flawed. Part of freedom, heargues, “consists in a persisting negotiation with the given.” Toabolish the given by re-engineering not only our world but alsoourselves would “leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside ourown will.” This is a profound insight. But it’s not fatal to freedom.It’s fatal to perfection.

In a world without givens, a world controlled by bioengineering, wewould dictate our nature as well as our practices and norms. We wouldgain unprecedented power to redefine the good. In so doing, we wouldstrip perfection of its independence. Its meaning would evolve as ournature and our ideals evolved. The more successfully we engineered I.Q.and muscle-to-fat ratio, the more central these measures would becometo our idea of perfection. We already see this phenomenon in our shiftof educational emphasis from character to academic testing. We mightcreate a world of perfect SATs, E.R.A.’s and C.E.O.’s. But it wouldnever be a perfect world, because the point of perfection is that itsdefinition doesn’t bend to our will.

This is the real problem with self-engineering. It seizes control ofhumanity so radically that humanity can no longer judge it. We can’t becertain it’s diminishing us. But we can’t be certain it’s perfectingus, either. Sandel got it half right, which ain’t bad. Nobody’s perfect.

William Saletan writes Slate’s “Human Nature” column and is the author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.