Customer Reviews

The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I bought this book because I really enjoyed the Atlantic Monthly article that preceded this effort. Unfortunately, this book didn't include any additional substance but a lot more fluff. I was totally bored with the effort and pretty disappointed. I would not recommend spending $20 on this book, but rather dig up a pdf of the article and enjoy it instead.

Sandel is a gifted, lucid writer, which is why I wish I could give this book more stars. But if I restrict myself just to its substance, I have to confess that more than once I felt like throwing this book across the room or shoving it into my garbage disposal. What an irritating and profoundly misguided book!

Sandel seems to think that using biotechnology, especially genetic engineering, to enhance human life inevitably means encroaching on, and perhaps even destroying, our ability to appreciate the "gifted" character of life itself. The assumption is that appreciating what is "given" (whether by God or nature) requires holding back from enhancing our offspring and ourselves and accepting as normative the abilities and limitations of modern human beings. If we do proceed with genetic enhancements, then, according to Sandel, we are corrupted by a hubristic ethic of "mastery" over what is naturally given. This is wrongheaded--and for two main reasons.

First, Sandel offers very little by way of defense of the normativity of the natural. Although he concedes that not everything that is natural is good (and rightly gives cancer as an example), he tells us almost nothing in this book, beyond appealing to a naïve, static, Aristotelian-style natural law theory, about why the fact that something is naturally given is in any way even relevant to its goodness, let alone why it ought not be improved. If he is going to be any kind of naturalist, he needs to go back and rethink the implications of Darwinian evolution for attempts to identify and enshrine an immutable human essence. (The prospects aren't good.) Beyond that, he needs a response to a long line of critics of Aristotelian naturalism, from Hume to Moore, who with good reason have attacked the idea that one could straightforwardly infer what "ought" to be from what "is." Sandel's Aristotelian naturalism is highly doubtful, and since the rest of his evaluations seem to depend upon it, they would appear to be highly doubtful as well.

Second, Sandel treats the sense of reverence, awe, and mystery that we feel towards nature, including our own current way of being, as if it were a kind of non-renewable resource--as if it were like, say, a finite, exhaustible quantity of petroleum lying under the earth's surface. This is ludicrous. It is much more probable that no matter how much human beings enhance themselves--no matter how tall they can grow themselves, how big they make their muscles, how much more powerful they make their memories, or how much they can genetically enhance the powers of their offspring--they will always be limited both by their environment and by their competition with each other (and possibly other beings). As a result, we will never reach the sort of smug self-satisfaction to which Sandel refers near the end of his book: we will never entirely "banish our appreciation of life as a gift" nor ever find ourselves with "nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will" (p. 100). No doubt there are people (and have for a long time been people) who failed to appreciate what is given them, but this has to do with the lack of a certain kind of sensibility, a kind of imaginative obtuseness. It has nothing directly to do with whether we can make ourselves live somewhat longer, grow somewhat taller, remember more, think somewhat more quickly, and the like. No matter how much we enhance ourselves, there will always be what is "given" relative to that stage of advancement and over which we have no control. We will never become masters of the universe, and, if we really do have enhanced mental abilities, we will not fall into the delusion of thinking that we are.

On the other hand, suppose Sandel is right, and suppose that we actually do have the power to erase the "given" and make ourselves true masters of the universe. I for one have trouble even understanding this possibility. But suppose (probably per impossibile) that it makes sense. Well, in that case, we would have become gods. And, if we really were gods, the accusation against us of hubris would be quite misplaced, wouldn't it?

An earlier reviewer mentioned a similarity between Sandel and Heidegger. Despite my more negative assessment of Sandel's book, that comment seemed to me to be close to the mark, since Heidegger too was a thinker who tended to mistake his own subjective preferences and concerns for deep ontological structures. Sandel doesn't like genetic manipulation and enhancement, and he projects this dislike, ironically in a rather hubristic manner, on a cosmic screen, as if it were deeply revealing of the nature of reality, life, and humanity. But it isn't. If my criticisms are correct, then an ethic of "giftedness," in which we appreciate the naturally given, can coexist with a determination to enhance our abilities and those of our children so as to make all of our lives as good (in our own eyes) as possible.

Don't worry. The universe will take care of reminding us that we have limits.

The book was an interesting read, but frustrating. There was a genetic determinism about the discussion that made the author's stand feel naive. Clearly the variation in many human features are constrained to a particular range by genetics, but this does not mean that any individual can be engineered to guarantee the development a particular trait. Even extremely pro-genes books like The Nurture Assumption leave an important role for environment in human development (Harris just doesn't think parents are a particularly influential part of that environment).

The gift argument is repeated throughout, but not supported very well. Sandel also discusses genetic modifications as arms races, but misses the fact that the "improvement" of human characteristics need not entail an arms race or a zero sum game. There are traits that have a value that is non-competitive. If research has found that people with a happiness score of 8-9 on a scale of 1-10 succeed most in life, it is correct to note that success in many fields is competitive. Yet, the feeling of happiness and enjoyment of life is not a zero sum game. Every human can enjoy this at the same time. If genetic engineering made us all 8-9 on the happiness scale, we would all benefit individually in our quality of life, though we would only be keeping pace with regards to competitive advantage. Again, Sandel misses this nuance and his discussions suffer from it.

The part of the book I felt was worth reading was the section regarding hyper-parenting. This was a point neglected in other books I have read on the subject, such as Agar's and Glover's. Nevertheless, the other books are far superior discussions of the subject with more exhaustive and nuanced discussions of genetic engineering.

I would advise against reading only this book when reading on this subject. This book should be read to offer another perspective after reading a more well rounded discussion like Glover's. As with any of the books I mention in this review, you should understand views on the role of genetics in development before reading the books. Don't expect the books to teach those details, though Agar's does contain good discussions regarding the fallacy of genetic determinism.

A Case Against Perfection, which I read in two sittings over 5 hours in one afternoon. I simply could not put the book down, Sandel proposes both sides in the debate of Cloning/Perfomance Enhancement/Gene Therapy etc... Sandel makes you guess and second guess, then triple guess your own beliefs on these issues. In the end, I felt well informed and satisfied with this book. I strongly recommend this book. Not lengthy, fast read, well written.

Enjoy.

This is a small but very impressive book: timely, interesting, original, extremely well informed, very clearly written, organized, and argued, and largely persuasive. Reading it (in two sittings) was like listening to the two best applied ethics lectures I've ever heard (and I've heard lots). I strongly recommend this book.

It seemed to me, nonetheless, that one of the main moral criteria Sandel relies on got a bit blurred by the end. The distinction between manipulative molding (bad) and respectful beholding (good) seems to me to draw the line of moral permissibility too far into passivity territory. It'd be better to recognize, as Sandel does in the nice appendix on the stem cell debate, that there are molding beholdings or respectful manipulations, i.e., active interventions that respect and help develop the intrinsic capacitites at issue. But if the mold/behold dichotomy blurs that way, it would seem to undermine the hard and original line Sandel takes against bioengineering in the main part of the book. It would suggest, instead, that we could indeed allow some forms of genetic enhancement so long as they respect the intrinsic excellences we decide matter most. (How we are to decide that is a tricky issue broached but not delved into in this book.) If this is right, however, it would put Sandel much closer to the liberal eugenicists he criticizes.

In the end, I think Sandel's book is great: insightful, thought-provoking, and largely persuasive. Sandel articulates an original and deeply humane vision that ethicists, politicians, and other thinking citizens very much need to hear -- and then develop further. (Interestingly, Sandel's ethical vision seems surprisingly close to the later Heidegger in several crucial respects; the book suggests that he was influenced by a Heideggerian theologian and some brilliant undergraduate at Harvard, but I'd guess there's more to it than that.)

I was very impressed with the thinking of Professor Sandel in this book. The best part was the last chapter, where in about thirty pages, he makes an eloquent case for embryonic stem cell research. While being respectful of the beliefs of conservatives who oppose it, he shows why their arguments are weak. I liked his analogy of the acorn not being an oak tree just as the embryo is not a baby, even though the oak was an acorn at one time. This is a serious, well-reasoned, intellectual book.

The best qualities about the book is readable; nice writing that flows and interesting cases and stories. On many an occasion, I paused from reading and started to reflect and ask hmmmm if genetic engineering becomes widespread yes this or that will be viewed differently. Take for example children born with down syndrome, if genetic screening allows parents ahead of time to know that they will conceive a child with down syndrome and they persist, then many in society will no longer see the parents as simply unlucky but more as a willful decision they chose.Sympathy and compassion might be lessened toward such a group of people.

But here lies the problem with most of the book "assumptions"

We have no idea that this will be necessarily the moral views in the people. After all Mother Teresa chose to work in Calcutta but yet she is praised for her sacrifice. So might not these parents be seen as also virtuous? No thought is given to this possibility. And many many more assumption are in the book....such as do we have any free will at all? If we as human have evolved would it not benefit parents in there bid for survival (of themselves and there genes) to produce children with above average IQs? What the author refers to as a gift, in a secular world, is that not just the product of the chance or luck? What he calls sanctity of life isn't that merely specism on a secular view?

As for his thesis that children should not be genetically modified as it would lessen there status as a gift, I feel his comments sum the state of the book well:

"it might be replied that nontheological notion of sanctity and gift cannot ultimately stand on their own but must lean on borrowed metaphysical assumptions they fail to acknowledge. This is a deep and difficult question that I cannot attempt to resolve here."

Use this book to whet you appetite for more information on the topic, nothing more.

Took this book for a class in Political Science, and happen to be a fan of Sandel after reading other work by him. I found this book similar to the way he does a lot of his arguments, meaning that he shows various sides and arguments to things he is not in favor of and never really expresses a straight out view. Though this book continues that process and could be quite redundant at times, all in all it was a good read and could really make someone wonder if eventually we will be separated between the people who have and the ones that do not.

With this book. Professor Michael Sandel of Harvard has written both a compelling and controversial assessment of bioethics that examines our increasing ability as humans to genetically alter and enhance our physical and intellectual beings. Some will like it because it sttempts to address the issue of what we should look out for in the race to unleash the benefits of biotechnology, while others will criticize it for its lack of detail. Since Sandel's work is really only an essay - and not a definitive study - meant to generate wider discussion on a crucial social matter, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. With recent major breakthroughs in genetic engineering that promise to take gene therapy to new levels, there is little that scientists can't do to make people more secure against an uncertain future. Disease, social stigma and physical disadvantages can potentially all be eliminated for a price. Sandel discusses the costs of such revolutionary endeavours in relation to the potential havoc it may cause society down the road. Do we want to create a sub-group of super-smart or super-athletic people who dominate their fields only because their parents have chosen to shell out big bucks to predetermine their genetic make-up? The goal of wanting to be masters rather than participants is fraught with all kinds of perils. Such hubris could challenge the very democratic foundations on which our society has been based: freedom of choice and equality of opportunity and participation. Sandel makes a very strong argument that while individuals in a liberal society have the right to choose to a large extent their destiny, they do not have the exclusive right to do it for others. Part of his thesis goes to the heart of why any eugenics program is wrong. Basing the right to life in any society on some limited standard such as mental capacity ultimately deprives the individual of the right to participate. Creating a perfect world where individuals are part of a cookie-cutting process eventually ends up destroying the essence of what has made us great as a civilization: our need to rely on God and each other for wisdom and knowledge. Science still has the moral authority, along with its power, to improve and enhance life but not at the expense of altering it for selfish gain. In order to use science to our best advantage in transforming life, we have to strike a balance between the rights of individuals and the needs of society. I recommend this book for the clear, concise argument Sandel presents in defense of moderation in a world fast losing its moral compass.

Sandel tries to make the case for limiting individual reproductive choice. His none-too-subtle agenda is to maintain the advantages of the genetic elites, such as himself, at the expense of the rest of society.

Sandel says he's against allowing parents to choose their children's genes. He assumes (correctly) that many social advantages (energy level, self-confidence, intelligence) are innate, and unevenly distributed. Secretly, he's happy that he can pass along his own traits (ability to focus for long periods, mild charisma) to his children. (I say "his children" to refer to the children of meritocrats generally.) But he dreads that the great unwashed masses will soon be able to alter their own genes to be more like his, since then his children would become less rare and special in their innate traits.

Sandel says "there remains something troubling with the ambition to control the genetic characteristics of the next generation". That's all very well for someone who's already born with the "gifted character of human powers" (i.e. the genes for success). But what if you're born with other genes? You'll never achieve as much social influence or status as Sandel and his kids.

Sandel worries that the "meritocracy, less chastened by chance, would become harder, less forgiving". Yeah, and meritocrats would also become more commonplace, leading to less social disparity in income and status. Today, corporations pay millions in salary and bonues to a rare cadre of super-smart, super-motivated genetic elites, who can in turn afford better lifestyles, better healthcare, and greater social influence (through political donations, ability to launch a national journal, etc).

"Changing our nature to fit the world," argues Sandel, "is actually the deepest form of disempowerment." Really? For you, perhaps.