Advances in biotechnology promise extraordinary powers to improve on the healthy and normal workings of the mind and body. Already today, there is widespread use of cosmetic procedures for a firmer body, anabolic steroids for superior performance, pharmaceutical stimulants for improved concentration, and human growth hormone for increased height in short but otherwise healthy children. What if similar reproductive enhancements were developed to the point where they were technologically feasible, medically safe, and economically accessible to all parents on behalf of their children-to-be? Would anything be morally objectionable about parents choosing to have offspring of a particular type?

In his latest book, political philosopher Michael Sandel reaches beyond familiar concerns about consent, equality, and autonomy to deliver the most penetrating account to date on the ethics of human enhancement. Professor Sandel argues that if genetic interventions for non-health-related traits, such as IQ, height, and athletic prowess became the normal way by which offspring came to acquire their particular biological constitutions, such practices would (a) erode the norms of parental love and (b) diminish the moral sentiments that social solidarity requires.

There are epistemological and normative components to each of his arguments. The epistemological component suggests that widespread enhancement would tend to promote morally undesirable dispositions of high-pressure parenting and indifference to the fate of the underprivileged. The normative component suggests that the expected impacts of routine genetic engineering should weigh in negatively, if not decisively, on the moral status of human enhancement. (Sandel does not address the question of legal status or regulatory proposals.)

That his moral arguments about parental love and social solidarity rely on a healthy measure of empirical speculation does not make them unpersuasive. To the contrary, both practical and theoretical reasons are needed to assess the moral status of emerging biotechnologies. Predicting changes in social attitudes and practices requires informed guesswork that is sensitive to the moral culture in which we live, while identifying the kinds of changes we should care about – and explaining why those changes should be either encouraged or avoided – requires careful moral reasoning. Sandel undertakes both projects with characteristic care.

The Case against Perfection leaves three central questions unresolved, however. First, what are the particular judgments that flow from the virtue-sensitive principles to which Sandel appeals? Second, what reason is there to think that genetic enhancement would have the undesirable influence on family and community relations that Sandel predicts? Third, what is so bad about lofty parental ambition and limited individual generosity in the first place? I shall address each question in turn.

First, Sandel is clear that genetic interventions that are intended to prevent pain, repair disability, or restore physiological wholeness are morally obligatory (p. 47). But we do not learn how he would come down on the permissibility of a number of hard cases. Would the concerns that he raises permit genetic manipulation to correct healthy but abnormal traits like extreme shyness or cleft lip? Do they allow embryo discard to avoid the birth of a child with the genes for Down Syndrome or Alzheimer's disease? How about genetic engineering for radical life extension? We are left with only the principle that enhancement is objectionable to the extent that it would be likely to express and promote certain habits of mind and ways of being under prevailing conditions and institutions (p. 96). The provisional character of this approach is an asset, however, not a deficit. The prospective impact of enhancement on self-understandings, social relationships, and flourishing communities cannot, for now, but remain speculative. Thus, the ethics of enhancement cannot be given generally or in advance, at least with any determinacy. Rather, it must be left open to a contextualized interrogation into the motivations and circumstances at stake in each case.

The second question concerns the influence that genetic engineering is likely to have on the attitudes and activities to which Sandel calls attention. This empirical question depends, in part, on how people in a genetically advanced future come to think about the meaning and significance of human enhancement. If offspring who are genetically enhanced for intelligence or beauty turn out to be no smarter or better looking than offspring who are conceived naturally, then the norms of mastery about which Sandel worries will be far less likely to seep into the public culture. However, if it turns out that designer children tend to become predictably successful adults, and prenatal engineering tends to reinforce convictions of genetic essentialism and aggressive consumerism, then the shift from chance to choice in human reproduction may strengthen temptations toward hyperparenting and narrow consideration for the misfortune of others.

Finally, why should we share Sandel's concern about the drive to mastery over human nature? The reason is not simply that interference with the randomness of genetic recombination would be to “play God.” Rather, by forcing parents to rein in the tendency toward excessive control in childrearing, the natural lottery helps to balance out the dual responsibilities that parents have both to accept their children as they are and also to guide them toward the good life as they see fit (p. 49). In making this case, Sandel neglects to address the dual preconditions of adolescent flourishing. On the one hand, children arrive into the world in an intensely dependent state, such that they rely on their parents to make childrearing decisions that nurture their gifts, repair their destructive tendencies, and cultivate in them admirable qualities of character. The fiduciary interest that progenitors have over the physical and emotional development of dependents that they had a part in making suggests a parental responsibility of future-oriented commitment to guide one's child, for a time, toward a fuller picture of what gives life value. On the other hand, children are born with talents and abilities that are highly contingent and ultimately unpredictable, such that parents cannot know whether a child will turn out in a way they would have wished for. And yet the childrens' being loved is nevertheless necessary for them to develop the ability to love others and to have a positive conception of themselves. Parents should therefore counterbalance the single-minded impulse toward guidance or control with the complementary disposition of acceptance.

An ethic of sharing is the more difficult to defend of the virtues that Sandel privileges. What need have we for solidarity or compassion, Kant asked, if their purpose is simply to correct for a bad state of affairs that we could remedy more effectively and more consistently by way of legislation? It is true that partiality and variability in the human expression of caring make it imprudent to rely on perfectly benevolent citizens. But even if just outcomes can be generated more reliably by enforcing a system of fair procedures and supporting institutions, few of the individual misfortunes – physical injury, dashed expectations, unrequited love – to which altruism and friendship respond can be avoided or alleviated by a system of enforceable rules alone. Furthermore, unless people share a strong underlying moral bond, public institutions will be without compelling moral reason for the less advantaged to make claims on the social and economic resources of the more advantaged (p. 91).

Sandel does not tell us whether the moral bads of parental controllingness and civic egoism ultimately outweigh the moral goods of parental liberty in reproductive decision-making and the promise of producing future generations who are more likely to have their lives go well. What he does, however, is to significantly advance a critical debate that has operated for too long under the misguided assumption that freedom and happiness are the only and overriding values at stake in our emerging powers of biotechnology. Two implications of Sandel's argument are especially significant. First, it bears surprising reasons to resist commonly accepted enhancements to which we have become accustomed in the hyper-competitive spheres of athletics, commerce, and childrearing (p. 52). Second, it invites us to resurrect questions about the relation between man and nature that have long been neglected by the landscape of moral and political philosophy (p. 9). These contributions make The Case against Perfection a very worthy read.