Michael Sandel's "The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering "

New York Times Book Review: By William Saletan

...That’s the way ethicists talk: things are good or bad, human or inhuman. The book’s subtitle encapsulates this project: “Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering.” But genetic engineering is too big for ethics. It changes human nature, and with it, our notions of good and bad. It even changes our notions of perfection. The problem with perfection in the age of self-transformation isn’t that it’s bad. The problem is that it’s incoherent. ...

Opponents of eugenic technologies usually complain that they’re unsafe, coercive, exploitative, nontherapeutic or unavailable to the poor. Sandel rebuts these objections, pointing out that they’re selectively applied and can be technically resolved. His deeper worry is that some kinds of enhancement violate the norms embedded in human practices. ...

To defend the old ways against the new, Sandel needs something deeper: a common foundation for the various norms in sports, arts and parenting. He thinks he has found it in the idea of giftedness. ...

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

But Sandel’s egalitarian fatalism already feels a bit 20th-century. The older half of me shares his dismay that some parents feel blamed for carrying babies with Down syndrome to term. But my younger half cringes at his flight from the “burden of decision” and “explosion of responsibility” that come with our expanding genetic power. Given a choice between a world of fate and blamelessness and a world of freedom and responsibility, I’ll take the latter. Such a world may be, as Sandel says, too daunting for the humans of today. But not for the humans of tomorrow.

Sandel is a very bright guy, and I am sympathetic to his project to bring "left communitarian" norms into bioethics. My guess is that most professional bioethicists, of more liberal/libertarian and/or utilitarian stripes and primary commitments to the value of individual autonomy, will be impatient with and unpersuaded by an effort of this type. I look forward to the book.