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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007

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Chapters 1-2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Epilogue

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Themes

Openness to the Unbidden

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of eugenics and the Holocaust.

Sandel’s argument against bioengineering is rooted primarily in the principle of openness to the unbidden. He attributes this phrase to William F. May, an American ethicist and theologian. By “unbidden,” Sandel and May mean the elements of life that are outside of people’s control. The unbidden is the unexpected, the surprising, or the unpredictable. In an increasingly technologically advanced world, the unbidden is in some senses disappearing. Holding onto and actively valuing that which remains unbidden in the world is an essential ethical principle in Sandel’s eyes. It is also something that many people find very difficult, as it requires a degree of trust in the unknown.

Genetic modification, in Sandel’s view, is inherently antithetical to the principle of openness to the unbidden. It could give parents the ability to choose their children’s genes before they are born, a practice antithetical to the unconditional love and acceptance that Sandel sees as the essence of good parenting. Openness to the unbidden is primarily framed in this text as a parenting principle predicated on humility. Children are inherently unpredictable: Before they come into the world, nobody knows who they will be, how they will look and act, or what they might do with their lives. Of course, even absent genetic engineering, parents can make some guesses: Their children will probably look like them, and they will have reasonably good odds of inheriting certain medical conditions or other genetic traits. The details, however, are unknowable. When parents are open to the unbidden, they are able to truly love their children for who they are, instead of for who they could or should be. Approaching parenthood with a sense of genuine curiosity and openness is fundamental to the unconditional love that is the foundation of the parent-child relationship.

The same principle, Sandel argues, also underpins athletics. So long as athletes are not bioengineered to be unnaturally good at their sports, people can accept their natural talents and their successes and failures as part of the beauty of the game. The understanding that nobody is fully in control of their own genetics allows people to experience a sense of humility regarding their own accomplishments. They may also feel a sense of solidarity with others, as anyone could experience unpredictable health issues at any time. Openness to the unbidden does not preclude people working to cure diseases, but it does require people to accept that their own health is not always fully within their control. This uncertainty, Sandel argues, is part of what makes life feel like a beautiful gift.

Mastery and Control

For Sandel, mastery and control represent the antithesis of openness to the unbidden. Genetic engineering is inherently about enacting far-reaching control over one’s own body and the bodies of one’s children, above and beyond what has ever been possible for human beings in the past. When parents decide their children’s genetic makeup in advance, they adopt a mindset that Sandel believes is corrosive to everyone’s humanity. This mindset frames children as the products of intentional design at the whims of their parents, robbing them of their self-sufficiency as individuals. The same is true of athletes who might choose to bioengineer themselves to improve their performance. Doing so is an expression of excessive mastery and control that risks turning people into perfectible commodities rather than unique individuals.

Sandel acknowledges that bioengineering is not the only way that parents can exert undue control over their children—or that athletes can exert undue control over themselves, for that matter. Some parents push their children to excel at sports, music, or academics, putting immense pressure on them from their earliest days through to their college careers and beyond. Likewise, athletes can already exert a great deal of non-genetic control over their bodies through diet, extreme training regimens, performance-enhancing drugs, and more. Some people argue that the existence of these forms of control justifies the use of genetic modification, but Sandel disagrees. All forms of excessive mastery and control are similarly problematic and point to a similar kind of hubris. Sandel notes that performance-enhancing drugs come with significant health risks, for example, and that their use within professional teams is often coercive. Excessive parental pressure, meanwhile, can have adverse impacts on young people’s mental health. Any attempt to eliminate chance and uncertainty from life is likely, in Sandel’s view, to do more harm than good. Bioengineering takes this hubristic approach to life to an extreme degree.

Health and Eugenics

Genetic engineering is inextricable from discussions of health and eugenics. The stated purpose of medicine is to cure illness and restore all people’s health. That is certainly what many medical procedures accomplish, and it is absolutely true that modern medicine is, by and large, a staggering and invaluable expression of human achievement that has saved and improved billions of lives. However, medicine can also be a normative practice that prioritizes certain bodies and certain types of people to the detriment of others. Weight stigma, medical racism, and intersex surgeries on infants are all examples of the normative harm that medicine can cause. Sandel argues that bioengineering threatens to extend and amplify these harms, as parents seek to design offspring with traits deemed desirable by society.

The discrimination and normative pressures endemic to modern medicine are in many ways outgrowths of the now-discredited practice of eugenics. Eugenics, popular from the 1880s to the mid-20th century, applied pseudo-Darwinian notions of “fitness” to the realm of human reproduction, arguing that only those deemed maximally “fit” ought to be permitted to reproduce. These notions of fitness reflected the racial and class prejudices of the era. Those who were not white, able-bodied, and comparatively wealthy were sometimes forcibly sterilized in a bid to rid the human population of any traits deemed undesirable. Eugenics is predicated on valuing certain people’s lives more than others. Support for eugenics waned rapidly after the WWII, as many people in the US and other countries realized the extent to which Hitler’s genocidal atrocities were based on eugenicist theories.

Bioengineering, Sandel argues, is inextricably linked with bioengineering. Whether it is state-mandated or individually chosen, bioengineering implies that certain traits are more desirable than others. If parents bioengineer their children, they send the message that their love is conditional, and that they believe that their children ought to look, act, and be a certain way; other ways of being, looking, and acting are then inherently framed as lesser. Sandel’s position is that while eugenics is a widely discredited ideology, it is still alive and well among parents who want to select their children’s genetic futures. Openness to the unbidden, which Sandel sees as fundamental to parental love, stands in opposition to a eugenic viewpoint, as it suggests that all children deserve unconditional love and respect without any reference to their specific genetic traits.