The Case Against Perfection Essay
Michael J. Sandel’s “The Case Against Perfection” examines a problem that becomes more
complicated as genetic technology becomes more powerful: what should human beings do when
science gives us the ability not only to treat illness, but also to improve healthy people? Genetic
engineering promises to prevent disease and repair defective genes, but the same scientific
knowledge could also be used to enhance muscles, memory, mood, intelligence, height, athletic
ability, and other human characteristics. Sandel argues that the most difficult questions begin
when medicine moves beyond healing and enters the territory of human enhancement.
One of the clearest examples is the difference between treating a medical condition and making a
healthy person better than normal. Gene therapy can be used to repair defective genes in cells,
which is fundamentally different from using biotechnology to increase physical or intellectual
abilities. Sandel compares genetic enhancement with familiar forms of improvement such as
cosmetic surgery, but argues that genetic enhancement reaches much deeper. A procedure
designed to change a person's appearance is one thing; deliberately altering the biological
capacities of a person raises questions about what it means to control human nature.
The possibility of stronger athletes provides another real-world example. Athletic achievement
has
traditionally
been
connected
with
training,
discipline,
talent,
and
effort.
Performance-enhancing drugs have already complicated this relationship because an athlete's
achievement can no longer be separated easily from the substances used to produce it. Sandel
imagines a future in which biotechnology could enhance muscles directly. If an athlete achieved
extraordinary results partly because of genetic enhancement, the achievement would raise a
different question: how much of the accomplishment belongs to the athlete's effort and how
much belongs to the technology?
This problem becomes especially important because sports are built around the development and
display of human abilities. Training can make an athlete stronger, faster, or more skilled, but
genetic enhancement could potentially change the underlying capacities with which the athlete
competes. Sandel argues that the concern is not simply whether enhanced athletes would have an
unfair advantage. It is also about what athletic achievement represents. If biotechnology becomes
responsible for an increasing portion of performance, admiration may shift away from the person
and toward the technology that produced the result.
Sandel extends this question from athletes to ordinary people. Imagine a technology that could
improve memory in a healthy person. Unlike treatment for memory loss caused by disease,
enhancement would allow someone who is already functioning normally to perform beyond the
ordinary range. Similar questions arise with attempts to increase height, strength, intelligence, or
other abilities. The important issue is not merely whether such technologies can work safely. It is
whether a society should become one in which people increasingly feel that natural limitations
are problems that must be corrected.
Height provides an especially revealing example. If parents could safely make their healthy
children several inches taller through biotechnology, some parents might choose the procedure
because height can influence social opportunities and personal confidence. At first, the decision
might appear to be an individual family choice. But if enhancement became common, refusing it
could eventually become a disadvantage. Parents might feel pressure to enhance their children
simply because other parents were doing so. A technology that begins as an optional
improvement could therefore become a social expectation.
The question becomes even more complicated when genetic technologies are used before a child
is born. Parents already make decisions that affect their children's lives. They choose schools,
neighborhoods, activities, medical care, and many other opportunities. Genetic engineering could
extend parental decision-making into the child's biological characteristics. Parents might
eventually be able to choose traits associated with athletic ability, intelligence, appearance, or
other characteristics.
This possibility leads to the idea of the “designer child.” The phrase describes a child whose
characteristics are deliberately selected or altered rather than simply inherited through the natural
combination of parental genes. Sandel examines why this idea is troubling even if the technology
becomes safe and widely available. The concern is not only about physical danger. It is also
about what happens to the relationship between parents and children when parents begin to think
of a child's characteristics as something they can design.
Parenthood normally involves accepting uncertainty. Parents can influence their children, but
they cannot completely determine who their children will become. A child's personality, abilities,
interests, and ambitions develop through a mixture of inheritance, environment, experience, and
individual choice. Sandel describes this unpredictability as part of the meaning of parenthood.
Children arrive with characteristics that parents did not completely choose, and parents learn to
love and raise them as they are.
Genetic enhancement could change that relationship. If parents could select characteristics before
birth, they might begin to view children less as gifts and more as projects. A parent who chooses
athletic ability might expect athletic success. A parent who selects exceptional academic
potential might expect outstanding grades. The child could then face expectations created before
the child had any opportunity to choose them.
This concern connects genetic enhancement with forms of intensive parenting that already exist.
Parents sometimes organize their children's education, sports, schedules, and activities with
extraordinary intensity because they want them to succeed. Sandel points to sports-focused
parents and parents who closely manage their children's academic careers as examples of this
tendency. Genetic engineering could become another tool in the same effort to control a child's
future.
The question of sex selection illustrates another real-world problem. Medical technologies such
as prenatal testing were developed for legitimate medical purposes, including detecting certain
genetic abnormalities. But the same technologies can also provide information about the sex of a
fetus. Once technology makes it possible to identify a characteristic, society must decide whether
knowing that characteristic should also permit parents to select it.
Sandel's concern is therefore broader than any single procedure. He is interested in the mindset
created by increasingly powerful biotechnology. When people gain the ability to control more
aspects of their biology, they may begin to believe that every limitation is something that should
be overcome. Human beings could gradually move from accepting what they receive to
expecting complete control over their biological inheritance.
This leads to Sandel's idea of
giftedness
. Human beings possess abilities they did not create
entirely for themselves. A person may work hard to become an excellent athlete, musician,
scientist, or writer, but that effort operates alongside talents, opportunities, circumstances, and
characteristics that were not completely chosen. We can develop our abilities, but we do not
begin life by designing them.
The desire for genetic perfection could weaken this sense of giftedness. If every ability can
eventually be engineered, people may begin to see achievement primarily as the result of control.
Instead of asking what a person has received and how that person developed it, society may
increasingly ask what was selected, modified, or optimized.
There is also a practical social consequence. If enhancement becomes available but expensive,
access could become unequal. Wealthy families might be able to purchase biological advantages
that poorer families cannot afford. The result could be a society in which inherited economic
inequality is joined by engineered biological inequality. Sandel's argument, however, goes
beyond fairness. Even if enhancement were eventually made available to everyone, he argues
that important moral questions would remain.
A completely equal enhancement system could still encourage parents to view their children as
objects of design. It could still change how society understands achievement. It could still
increase pressure to improve and compete. And it could still encourage the belief that human
beings should take complete control of characteristics that were previously understood as part of
the unpredictability of life.
The deeper issue in “The Case Against Perfection” is therefore not simply whether genetic
engineering is good or bad. Sandel asks what kind of human attitude accompanies the pursuit of
biological perfection. Scientific progress can give people extraordinary power, but having the
ability to control something does not automatically answer the question of whether it should be
controlled.
The essay ultimately asks readers to reconsider the meaning of achievement, parenthood,
responsibility, and human limitation. Treating disease can restore a person's ability to live a
normal life, while enhancement attempts to move beyond what is considered normal. That
difference creates an ethical boundary that cannot be settled by science alone.
Sandel's discussion of designer children, enhanced athletes, memory improvement, height
selection, and genetic engineering shows how ordinary desires for health, success, and
opportunity can lead to much larger questions. Parents want their children to succeed. Athletes
want to perform better. Individuals want longer, healthier, more capable lives. These desires are
understandable, but biotechnology gives them a new power and therefore creates new
responsibilities.
“The Case Against Perfection” ultimately argues that human beings should think carefully about
what is lost when everything becomes an object of design. Human life contains achievement and
failure, talent and limitation, planning and chance. For Sandel, accepting some of these limits
does not mean rejecting scientific progress. It means recognizing that the desire to control every
aspect of human life can change the way people understand themselves, their children, and one
another.
