Michael Sandel makes 'The Case Against Perfection'

A Harvard professor offers a philosophical rebuttal to the temptations of genetic engineering.

from the June 5, 2007 edition

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For one thing, Sandel says, such choices unfairly burden parents. Will they choose the right menu of traits? Parents have a responsibility to nurture children, but not the right to determine their futures.

"To appreciate children as gifts is to accept them as they come, not as objects of our design, or products of our will, or instruments of our ambition," he writes. "Parental love is not contingent on the talents and attributes the child happens to have." Genetic manipulation represents a kind of "hubris" on the part of designing parents and "disfigures the relation between parent and child." "[T]hat we are not wholly responsible for the way we are," is a blessing, not a curse, Sandel argues.

He reminds readers that eugenics – the theory of improving the human race through selective breeding (and preventing the breeding of the "unfit") – was widely lauded in the early 20th century. It was backed by the Carnegie Institution and endorsed by luminaries such as John D. Rockefeller Jr., Theodore Roosevelt, and feminist Margaret Sanger. Only when Nazi Germany revealed how eugenics could make a horrifying dark descent into genocide did it lose popular appeal.

Free-market eugenics?

Sixty years later, scientific advances have rekindled interest in a "liberal eugenics," in which, advocates argue, coercion would be outlawed. Governments could not tell parents what sort of children to design. Parents would be allowed to engineer in their children "only those traits that improve their capacities without biasing their choice of life plans," Sandel says, explaining the proposition. In this "free market" eugenics, parents would select freely from a "supermarket" of choices.

But even this apparently benign manipulation has dangers, Sandel says. What is to prevent governments from insisting that parents not "deprive" their children of genetic enhancement? Might anything less be considered a form of child abuse?

This beautifully crafted little book, expanded from an essay by Sandel in The Atlantic Monthly, quickly and clearly lays out the key issues at stake. One senses that Sandel realizes that the case in favor of genetic engineering is a strong one, in need of an equally robust and cogent rebuttal.

"There is something appealing, even intoxicating, about a vision of human freedom unfettered by the given," Sandel concedes. Genetic engineering can be seen as "the ultimate expression of our resolve to see ourselves astride the world, the masters of our nature.... But that vision of freedom is flawed. It threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a gift, and to leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will."

• Gregory M. Lamb is on the Monitor staff.

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