The Case Against Perfection
- MICHAEL J. SANDEL
What's wrong with designer children, bionic athletes, and genetic engineering?
David
by Michelangelo Buonarroti |
Breakthroughs
in genetics present us with a promise and a predicament. The promise is that we
may soon be able to treat and prevent a host of debilitating diseases. The predicament
is that our newfound genetic knowledge may also enable us to manipulate our own
nature to enhance our muscles, memories, and moods; to choose the sex, height,
and other genetic traits of our children; to make ourselves "better than well."
When science moves faster than moral understanding, as it does today, men and
women struggle to articulate their unease. In liberal societies they reach first
for the language of autonomy, fairness, and individual rights. But this part of
our moral vocabulary is ill equipped to address the hardest questions posed by
genetic engineering. The genomic revolution has induced a kind of moral vertigo.
Consider cloning. The birth of Dolly the cloned sheep, in 1997, brought a torrent
of concern about the prospect of cloned human beings. There are good medical reasons
to worry. Most scientists agree that cloning is unsafe, likely to produce offspring
with serious abnormalities. (Dolly recently died a premature death.) But suppose
technology improved to the point where clones were at no greater risk than naturally
conceived offspring. Would human cloning still be objectionable? Should our hesitation
be moral as well as medical? What, exactly, is wrong with creating a child who
is a genetic twin of one parent, or of an older sibling who has tragically died
or, for that matter, of an admired scientist, sports star, or celebrity?
Some say cloning is wrong because it violates the right to autonomy: by choosing
a child's genetic makeup in advance, parents deny the child's right to an open
future. A similar objection can be raised against any form of bioengineering that
allows parents to select or reject genetic characteristics. According to this
argument, genetic enhancements for musical talent, say, or athletic prowess, would
point children toward particular choices, and so designer children would never
be fully free.
At first glance the autonomy argument seems to capture
what is troubling about human cloning and other forms of genetic engineering.
It is not persuasive, for two reasons. First, it wrongly implies that absent a
designing parent, children are free to choose their characteristics for themselves.
But none of us chooses his genetic inheritance. The alternative to a cloned or
genetically enhanced child is not one whose future is unbound by particular talents
but one at the mercy of the genetic lottery.
Second, even if a concern
for autonomy explains some of our worries about made-to-order children, it cannot
explain our moral hesitation about people who seek genetic remedies or enhancements
for themselves. Gene therapy on somatic (that is, nonreproductive) cells, such
as muscle cells and brain cells, repairs or replaces defective genes. The moral
quandary arises when people use such therapy not to cure a disease but to reach
beyond health, to enhance their physical or cognitive capacities, to lift themselves
above the norm.
Like cosmetic surgery, genetic enhancement employs medical
means for nonmedical ends ends unrelated to curing or preventing disease or
repairing injury. But unlike cosmetic surgery, genetic enhancement is more than
skin-deep. If we are ambivalent about surgery or Botox injections for sagging
chins and furrowed brows, we are all the more troubled by genetic engineering
for stronger bodies, sharper memories, greater intelligence, and happier moods.
The question is whether we are right to be troubled, and if so, on what grounds.
In
order to grapple with the ethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions
largely lost from view questions about the moral status of nature, and about
the proper stance of human beings toward the given world. Since these questions
verge on theology, modern philosophers and political theorists tend to shrink
from them. But our new powers of biotechnology make them unavoidable. To see why
this is so, consider four examples already on the horizon: muscle enhancement,
memory enhancement, growth-hormone treatment, and reproductive technologies that
enable parents to choose the sex and some genetic traits of their children. In
each case what began as an attempt to treat a disease or prevent a genetic disorder
now beckons as an instrument of improvement and consumer choice.
Muscles.
Everyone would welcome a gene therapy to alleviate muscular dystrophy and
to reverse the debilitating muscle loss that comes with old age. But what if the
same therapy were used to improve athletic performance? Researchers have developed
a synthetic gene that, when injected into the muscle cells of mice, prevents and
even reverses natural muscle deterioration. The gene not only repairs wasted or
injured muscles but also strengthens healthy ones. This success bodes well for
human applications. H. Lee Sweeney, of the University of Pennsylvania, who leads
the research, hopes his discovery will cure the immobility that afflicts the elderly.
But Sweeney's bulked-up mice have already attracted the attention of athletes
seeking a competitive edge. Although the therapy is not yet approved for human
use, the prospect of genetically enhanced weight lifters, home-run sluggers, linebackers,
and sprinters is easy to imagine. The widespread use of steroids and other performance-improving
drugs in professional sports suggests that many athletes will be eager to avail
themselves of genetic enhancement.
Suppose for the sake of argument that
muscle-enhancing gene therapy, unlike steroids, turned out to be safe or at
least no riskier than a rigorous weight-training regimen. Would there be a reason
to ban its use in sports? There is something unsettling about the image of genetically
altered athletes lifting SUVs or hitting 650-foot home runs or running a three-minute
mile. But what, exactly, is troubling about it? Is it simply that we find such
superhuman spectacles too bizarre to contemplate? Or does our unease point to
something of ethical significance?
It might be argued that a genetically
enhanced athlete, like a drug-enhanced athlete, would have an unfair advantage
over his unenhanced competitors. But the fairness argument against enhancement
has a fatal flaw: it has always been the case that some athletes are better endowed
genetically than others, and yet we do not consider this to undermine the fairness
of competitive sports. From the standpoint of fairness, enhanced genetic differences
would be no worse than natural ones, assuming they were safe and made available
to all. If genetic enhancement in sports is morally objectionable, it must be
for reasons other than fairness.
Memory.
Genetic enhancement is possible for brains as well as brawn. In the mid-1990s
scientists managed to manipulate a memory-linked gene in fruit flies, creating
flies with photographic memories. More recently researchers have produced smart
mice by inserting extra copies of a memory-related gene into mouse embryos. The
altered mice learn more quickly and remember things longer than normal mice. The
extra copies were programmed to remain active even in old age, and the improvement
was passed on to offspring.
Human memory is more complicated, but biotech
companies, including Memory Pharmaceuticals, are in hot pursuit of memory-enhancing
drugs, or "cognition enhancers," for human beings. The obvious market for such
drugs consists of those who suffer from Alzheimer's and other serious memory disorders.
The companies also have their sights on a bigger market: the 81 million Americans
over fifty, who are beginning to encounter the memory loss that comes naturally
with age. A drug that reversed age-related memory loss would be a bonanza for
the pharmaceutical industry: a Viagra for the brain. Such use would straddle the
line between remedy and enhancement. Unlike a treatment for Alzheimer's, it would
cure no disease; but insofar as it restored capacities a person once possessed,
it would have a remedial aspect. It could also have purely nonmedical uses: for
example, by a lawyer cramming to memorize facts for an upcoming trial, or by a
business executive eager to learn Mandarin on the eve of his departure for Shanghai.
Some who worry about the ethics of cognitive enhancement point to the
danger of creating two classes of human beings: those with access to enhancement
technologies, and those who must make do with their natural capacities. And if
the enhancements could be passed down the generations, the two classes might eventually
become subspecies the enhanced and the merely natural. But worry about access
ignores the moral status of enhancement itself. Is the scenario troubling because
the unenhanced poor would be denied the benefits of bioengineering, or because
the enhanced affluent would somehow be dehumanized? As with muscles, so with memory:
the fundamental question is not how to ensure equal access to enhancement but
whether we should aspire to it in the first place.
Height.
Pediatricians already struggle with the ethics of enhancement when confronted
by parents who want to make their children taller. Since the 1980s human growth
hormone has been approved for children with a hormone deficiency that makes them
much shorter than average. But the treatment also increases the height of healthy
children. Some parents of healthy children who are unhappy with their stature
(typically boys) ask why it should make a difference whether a child is short
because of a hormone deficiency or because his parents happen to be short. Whatever
the cause, the social consequences are the same.
In the face of this
argument some doctors began prescribing hormone treatments for children whose
short stature was unrelated to any medical problem. By 1996 such "off-label" use
accounted for 40 percent of human-growth-hormone prescriptions. Although it is
legal to prescribe drugs for purposes not approved by the Food and Drug Administration,
pharmaceutical companies cannot promote such use. Seeking to expand its market,
Eli Lilly & Co. recently persuaded the FDA to approve its human growth hormone
for healthy children whose projected adult height is in the bottom one percentile
under five feet three inches for boys and four feet eleven inches for girls.
This concession raises a large question about the ethics of enhancement: If hormone
treatments need not be limited to those with hormone deficiencies, why should
they be available only to very short children? Why shouldn't all shorter-than-average
children be able to seek treatment? And what about a child of average height who
wants to be taller so that he can make the basketball team?
Some oppose
height enhancement on the grounds that it is collectively self-defeating; as some
become taller, others become shorter relative to the norm. Except in Lake Wobegon,
not every child can be above average. As the unenhanced began to feel shorter,
they, too, might seek treatment, leading to a hormonal arms race that left everyone
worse off, especially those who couldn't afford to buy their way up from shortness.
But the arms-race objection is not decisive on its own. Like the fairness
objection to bioengineered muscles and memory, it leaves unexamined the attitudes
and dispositions that prompt the drive for enhancement. If we were bothered only
by the injustice of adding shortness to the problems of the poor, we could remedy
that unfairness by publicly subsidizing height enhancements. As for the relative
height deprivation suffered by innocent bystanders, we could compensate them by
taxing those who buy their way to greater height. The real question is whether
we want to live in a society where parents feel compelled to spend a fortune to
make perfectly healthy kids a few inches taller.
Sex selection. Perhaps the most inevitable nonmedical use
of bioengineering is sex selection. For centuries parents have been trying to
choose the sex of their children. Today biotech succeeds where folk remedies failed.
One technique for sex selection arose with prenatal tests using amniocentesis
and ultrasound. These medical technologies were developed to detect genetic abnormalities
such as spina bifida and Down syndrome. But they can also reveal the sex of the
fetus allowing for the abortion of a fetus of an undesired sex. Even among those
who favor abortion rights, few advocate abortion simply because the parents do
not want a girl. Nevertheless, in traditional societies with a powerful cultural
preference for boys, this practice has become widespread.
Sex selection
need not involve abortion, however. For couples undergoing in vitro fertilization
(IVF), it is possible to choose the sex of the child before the fertilized egg
is implanted in the womb. One method makes use of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis
(PGD), a procedure developed to screen for genetic diseases. Several eggs are
fertilized in a petri dish and grown to the eight-cell stage (about three days).
At that point the embryos are tested to determine their sex. Those of the desired
sex are implanted; the others are typically discarded. Although few couples are
likely to undergo the difficulty and expense of IVF simply to choose the sex of
their child, embryo screening is a highly reliable means of sex selection. And
as our genetic knowledge increases, it may be possible to use PGD to cull embryos
carrying undesired genes, such as those associated with obesity, height, and skin
color. The science-fiction movie Gattaca depicts a future in which parents
routinely screen embryos for sex, height, immunity to disease, and even IQ. There
is something troubling about the Gattaca scenario, but it is not easy to
identify what exactly is wrong with screening embryos to choose the sex of our
children.
One line of objection draws on arguments familiar from the
abortion debate. Those who believe that an embryo is a person reject embryo screening
for the same reasons they reject abortion. If an eight-cell embryo growing in
a petri dish is morally equivalent to a fully developed human being, then discarding
it is no better than aborting a fetus, and both practices are equivalent to infanticide.
Whatever its merits, however, this "pro-life" objection is not an argument against
sex selection as such.
The latest technology poses the question of sex
selection unclouded by the matter of an embryo's moral status. The Genetics &
IVF Institute, a for-profit infertility clinic in Fairfax, Virginia, now offers
a sperm-sorting technique that makes it possible to choose the sex of one's child
before it is conceived. X-bearing sperm, which produce girls, carry more DNA than
Y-bearing sperm, which produce boys; a device called a flow cytometer can separate
them. The process, called MicroSort, has a high rate of success.
If sex
selection by sperm sorting is objectionable, it must be for reasons that go beyond
the debate about the moral status of the embryo. One such reason is that sex selection
is an instrument of sex discrimination typically against girls, as illustrated
by the chilling sex ratios in India and China. Some speculate that societies with
substantially more men than women will be less stable, more violent, and more
prone to crime or war. These are legitimate worries but the sperm-sorting company
has a clever way of addressing them. It offers MicroSort only to couples who want
to choose the sex of a child for purposes of "family balancing." Those with more
sons than daughters may choose a girl, and vice versa. But customers may not use
the technology to stock up on children of the same sex, or even to choose the
sex of their firstborn child. (So far the majority of MicroSort clients have chosen
girls.) Under restrictions of this kind, do any ethical issues remain that should
give us pause?
The
case of MicroSort helps us isolate the moral objections that would persist if
muscle-enhancement, memory-enhancement, and height-enhancement technologies were
safe and available to all.
It is commonly said that genetic enhancements
undermine our humanity by threatening our capacity to act freely, to succeed by
our own efforts, and to consider ourselves responsible worthy of praise or blame
for the things we do and for the way we are. It is one thing to hit seventy
home runs as the result of disciplined training and effort, and something else,
something less, to hit them with the help of steroids or genetically enhanced
muscles. Of course, the roles of effort and enhancement will be a matter of degree.
But as the role of enhancement increases, our admiration for the achievement fades
or, rather, our admiration for the achievement shifts from the player to his
pharmacist. This suggests that our moral response to enhancement is a response
to the diminished agency of the person whose achievement is enhanced.
Though there is much to be said for this argument, I do not think the main problem
with enhancement and genetic engineering is that they undermine effort and erode
human agency. The deeper danger is that they represent a kind of hyperagency
a Promethean aspiration to remake nature, including human nature, to serve our
purposes and satisfy our desires. The problem is not the drift to mechanism but
the drive to mastery. And what the drive to mastery misses and may even destroy
is an appreciation of the gifted character of human powers and achievements.
To acknowledge the giftedness of life is to recognize that our talents and powers
are not wholly our own doing, despite the effort we expend to develop and to exercise
them. It is also to recognize that not everything in the world is open to whatever
use we may desire or devise. Appreciating the gifted quality of life constrains
the Promethean project and conduces to a certain humility. It is in part a religious
sensibility. But its resonance reaches beyond religion.
It is difficult
to account for what we admire about human activity and achievement without drawing
upon some version of this idea. Consider two types of athletic achievement. We
appreciate players like Pete Rose, who are not blessed with great natural gifts
but who manage, through striving, grit, and determination, to excel in their sport.
But we also admire players like Joe DiMaggio, who display natural gifts with grace
and effortlessness. Now, suppose we learned that both players took performance-enhancing
drugs. Whose turn to drugs would we find more deeply disillusioning? Which aspect
of the athletic ideal effort or gift would be more deeply offended?
Some might say effort: the problem with drugs is that they provide a shortcut,
a way to win without striving. But striving is not the point of sports; excellence
is. And excellence consists at least partly in the display of natural talents
and gifts that are no doing of the athlete who possesses them. This is an uncomfortable
fact for democratic societies. We want to believe that success, in sports and
in life, is something we earn, not something we inherit. Natural gifts, and the
admiration they inspire, embarrass the meritocratic faith; they cast doubt on
the conviction that praise and rewards flow from effort alone. In the face of
this embarrassment we inflate the moral significance of striving, and depreciate
giftedness. This distortion can be seen, for example, in network-television coverage
of the Olympics, which focuses less on the feats the athletes perform than on
heartrending stories of the hardships they have overcome and the struggles they
have waged to triumph over an injury or a difficult upbringing or political turmoil
in their native land.
But effort isn't everything. No one believes that
a mediocre basketball player who works and trains even harder than Michael Jordan
deserves greater acclaim or a bigger contract. The real problem with genetically
altered athletes is that they corrupt athletic competition as a human activity
that honors the cultivation and display of natural talents. From this standpoint,
enhancement can be seen as the ultimate expression of the ethic of effort and
willfulness a kind of high-tech striving. The ethic of willfulness and the biotechnological
powers it now enlists are arrayed against the claims of giftedness.
The
ethic of giftedness, under siege in sports, persists in the practice of parenting.
But here, too, bioengineering and genetic enhancement threaten to dislodge it.
To appreciate children as gifts is to accept them as they come, not as objects
of our design or products of our will or instruments of our ambition. Parental
love is not contingent on the talents and attributes a child happens to have.
We choose our friends and spouses at least partly on the basis of qualities we
find attractive. But we do not choose our children. Their qualities are unpredictable,
and even the most conscientious parents cannot be held wholly responsible for
the kind of children they have. That is why parenthood, more than other human
relationships, teaches what the theologian William F. May calls an "openness to
the unbidden."
May's resonant phrase helps us see that the deepest moral
objection to enhancement lies less in the perfection it seeks than in the human
disposition it expresses and promotes. The problem is not that parents usurp the
autonomy of a child they design. The problem lies in the hubris of the designing
parents, in their drive to master the mystery of birth. Even if this disposition
did not make parents tyrants to their children, it would disfigure the relation
between parent and child, and deprive the parent of the humility and enlarged
human sympathies that an openness to the unbidden can cultivate.
To appreciate
children as gifts or blessings is not, of course, to be passive in the face of
illness or disease. Medical intervention to cure or prevent illness or restore
the injured to health does not desecrate nature but honors it. Healing sickness
or injury does not override a child's natural capacities but permits them to flourish.
Nor does the sense of life as a gift mean that parents must shrink from shaping
and directing the development of their child. Just as athletes and artists have
an obligation to cultivate their talents, so parents have an obligation to cultivate
their children, to help them discover and develop their talents and gifts. As
May points out, parents give their children two kinds of love: accepting love
and transforming love. Accepting love affirms the being of the child, whereas
transforming love seeks the well-being of the child. Each aspect corrects the
excesses of the other, he writes: "Attachment becomes too quietistic if it slackens
into mere acceptance of the child as he is." Parents have a duty to promote their
children's excellence.
These days, however, overly ambitious parents
are prone to get carried away with transforming love promoting and demanding
all manner of accomplishments from their children, seeking perfection. "Parents
find it difficult to maintain an equilibrium between the two sides of love," May
observes. "Accepting love, without transforming love, slides into indulgence and
finally neglect. Transforming love, without accepting love, badgers and finally
rejects." May finds in these competing impulses a parallel with modern science:
it, too, engages us in beholding the given world, studying and savoring it, and
also in molding the world, transforming and perfecting it.
The mandate
to mold our children, to cultivate and improve them, complicates the case against
enhancement. We usually admire parents who seek the best for their children, who
spare no effort to help them achieve happiness and success. Some parents confer
advantages on their children by enrolling them in expensive schools, hiring private
tutors, sending them to tennis camp, providing them with piano lessons, ballet
lessons, swimming lessons, SAT-prep courses, and so on. If it is permissible and
even admirable for parents to help their children in these ways, why isn't it
equally admirable for parents to use whatever genetic technologies may emerge
(provided they are safe) to enhance their children's intelligence, musical ability,
or athletic prowess?
The defenders of enhancement are right to this extent:
improving children through genetic engineering is similar in spirit to the heavily
managed, high-pressure child-rearing that is now common. But this similarity does
not vindicate genetic enhancement. On the contrary, it highlights a problem with
the trend toward hyperparenting. One conspicuous example of this trend is sports-crazed
parents bent on making champions of their children. Another is the frenzied drive
of overbearing parents to mold and manage their children's academic careers.
As the pressure for performance increases, so does the need to help distractible
children concentrate on the task at hand. This may be why diagnoses of attention
deficit and hyperactivity disorder have increased so sharply. Lawrence Diller,
a pediatrician and the author of Running
on Ritalin, estimates that five to six percent of American children under
eighteen (a total of four to five million kids) are currently prescribed Ritalin,
Adderall, and other stimulants, the treatment of choice for ADHD. (Stimulants
counteract hyperactivity by making it easier to focus and sustain attention.)
The number of Ritalin prescriptions for children and adolescents has tripled over
the past decade, but not all users suffer from attention disorders or hyperactivity.
High school and college students have learned that prescription stimulants improve
concentration for those with normal attention spans, and some buy or borrow their
classmates' drugs to enhance their performance on the SAT or other exams. Since
stimulants work for both medical and nonmedical purposes, they raise the same
moral questions posed by other technologies of enhancement.
However those
questions are resolved, the debate reveals the cultural distance we have traveled
since the debate over marijuana, LSD, and other drugs a generation ago. Unlike
the drugs of the 1960s and 1970s, Ritalin and Adderall are not for checking out
but for buckling down, not for beholding the world and taking it in but for molding
the world and fitting in. We used to speak of nonmedical drug use as "recreational."
That term no longer applies. The steroids and stimulants that figure in the enhancement
debate are not a source of recreation but a bid for compliance a way of answering
a competitive society's demand to improve our performance and perfect our nature.
This demand for performance and perfection animates the impulse to rail against
the given. It is the deepest source of the moral trouble with enhancement.
Some see a clear line between genetic enhancement and other ways that people seek
improvement in their children and themselves. Genetic manipulation seems somehow
worse more intrusive, more sinister than other ways of enhancing performance
and seeking success. But morally speaking, the difference is less significant
than it seems. Bioengineering gives us reason to question the low-tech, high-pressure
child-rearing practices we commonly accept. The hyperparenting familiar in our
time represents an anxious excess of mastery and dominion that misses the sense
of life as a gift. This draws it disturbingly close to eugenics.
The
shadow of eugenics hangs over today's debates about genetic engineering and enhancement.
Critics of genetic engineering argue that human cloning, enhancement, and the
quest for designer children are nothing more than "privatized" or "free-market"
eugenics. Defenders of enhancement reply that genetic choices freely made are
not really eugenic at least not in the pejorative sense. To remove the coercion,
they argue, is to remove the very thing that makes eugenic policies repugnant.
Sorting out the lesson of eugenics is another way of wrestling with the
ethics of enhancement. The Nazis gave eugenics a bad name. But what, precisely,
was wrong with it? Was the old eugenics objectionable only insofar as it was coercive?
Or is there something inherently wrong with the resolve to deliberately design
our progeny's traits?
James Watson, the biologist who, with Francis Crick,
discovered the structure of DNA, sees nothing wrong with genetic engineering and
enhancement, provided they are freely chosen rather than state-imposed. And yet
Watson's language contains more than a whiff of the old eugenic sensibility. "If
you really are stupid, I would call that a disease," he recently told The Times
of London. "The lower 10 percent who really have difficulty, even in elementary
school, what's the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty,
things like that.' It probably isn't. So I'd like to get rid of that, to help
the lower 10 percent." A few years ago Watson stirred controversy by saying that
if a gene for homosexuality were discovered, a woman should be free to abort a
fetus that carried it. When his remark provoked an uproar, he replied that he
was not singling out gays but asserting a principle: women should be free to abort
fetuses for any reason of genetic preference for example, if the child would
be dyslexic, or lacking musical talent, or too short to play basketball.
Watson's scenarios are clearly objectionable to those for whom all abortion is
an unspeakable crime. But for those who do not subscribe to the pro-life position,
these scenarios raise a hard question: If it is morally troubling to contemplate
abortion to avoid a gay child or a dyslexic one, doesn't this suggest that something
is wrong with acting on any eugenic preference, even when no state coercion is
involved?
Consider the market in eggs and sperm. The advent of artificial
insemination allows prospective parents to shop for gametes with the genetic traits
they desire in their offspring. It is a less predictable way to design children
than cloning or pre-implantation genetic screening, but it offers a good example
of a procreative practice in which the old eugenics meets the new consumerism.
A few years ago some Ivy League newspapers ran an ad seeking an egg from a woman
who was at least five feet ten inches tall and athletic, had no major family medical
problems, and had a combined SAT score of 1400 or above. The ad offered $50,000
for an egg from a donor with these traits. More recently a Web site was launched
claiming to auction eggs from fashion models whose photos appeared on the site,
at starting bids of $15,000 to $150,000.
On what grounds, if any, is the
egg market morally objectionable? Since no one is forced to buy or sell, it cannot
be wrong for reasons of coercion. Some might worry that hefty prices would exploit
poor women by presenting them with an offer they couldn't refuse. But the designer
eggs that fetch the highest prices are likely to be sought from the privileged,
not the poor. If the market for premium eggs gives us moral qualms, this, too,
shows that concerns about eugenics are not put to rest by freedom of choice.
A tale of two sperm banks helps explain why. The Repository for Germinal Choice,
one of America's first sperm banks, was not a commercial enterprise. It was opened
in 1980 by Robert Graham, a philanthropist dedicated to improving the world's
"germ plasm" and counteracting the rise of "retrograde humans." His plan was to
collect the sperm of Nobel Prize-winning scientists and make it available to women
of high intelligence, in hopes of breeding supersmart babies. But Graham had trouble
persuading Nobel laureates to donate their sperm for his bizarre scheme, and so
settled for sperm from young scientists of high promise. His sperm bank closed
in 1999.
In contrast, California Cryobank, one of the world's leading
sperm banks, is a for-profit company with no overt eugenic mission. Cappy Rothman,
M.D., a co-founder of the firm, has nothing but disdain for Graham's eugenics,
although the standards Cryobank imposes on the sperm it recruits are exacting.
Cryobank has offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, between Harvard and MIT, and
in Palo Alto, California, near Stanford. It advertises for donors in campus newspapers
(compensation up to $900 a month), and accepts less than five percent of the men
who apply. Cryobank's marketing materials play up the prestigious source of its
sperm. Its catalogue provides detailed information about the physical characteristics
of each donor, along with his ethnic origin and college major. For an extra fee
prospective customers can buy the results of a test that assesses the donor's
temperament and character type. Rothman reports that Cryobank's ideal sperm donor
is six feet tall, with brown eyes, blond hair, and dimples, and has a college
degree not because the company wants to propagate those traits, but because
those are the traits his customers want: "If our customers wanted high school
dropouts, we would give them high school dropouts."
Not everyone objects
to marketing sperm. But anyone who is troubled by the eugenic aspect of the Nobel
Prize sperm bank should be equally troubled by Cryobank, consumer-driven though
it be. What, after all, is the moral difference between designing children according
to an explicit eugenic purpose and designing children according to the dictates
of the market? Whether the aim is to improve humanity's "germ plasm" or to cater
to consumer preferences, both practices are eugenic insofar as both make children
into products of deliberate design.
A number of political philosophers
call for a new "liberal eugenics." They argue that a moral distinction can be
drawn between the old eugenic policies and genetic enhancements that do not restrict
the autonomy of the child. "While old-fashioned authoritarian eugenicists sought
to produce citizens out of a single centrally designed mould," writes Nicholas
Agar, "the distinguishing mark of the new liberal eugenics is state neutrality."
Government may not tell parents what sort of children to design, and parents may
engineer in their children only those traits that improve their capacities without
biasing their choice of life plans. A recent text on genetics and justice, written
by the bioethicists Allen Buchanan, Dan W. Brock, Norman Daniels, and Daniel Wikler,
offers a similar view. The "bad reputation of eugenics," they write, is due to
practices that "might be avoidable in a future eugenic program." The problem with
the old eugenics was that its burdens fell disproportionately on the weak and
the poor, who were unjustly sterilized and segregated. But provided that the benefits
and burdens of genetic improvement are fairly distributed, these bioethicists
argue, eugenic measures are unobjectionable and may even be morally required.
The libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick proposed a "genetic supermarket" that
would enable parents to order children by design without imposing a single design
on the society as a whole: "This supermarket system has the great virtue that
it involves no centralized decision fixing the future human type(s)."
Even the leading philosopher of American liberalism, John Rawls, in his classic
A Theory of Justice (1971), offered a brief endorsement of noncoercive
eugenics. Even in a society that agrees to share the benefits and burdens of the
genetic lottery, it is "in the interest of each to have greater natural assets,"
Rawls wrote. "This enables him to pursue a preferred plan of life." The parties
to the social contract "want to insure for their descendants the best genetic
endowment (assuming their own to be fixed)." Eugenic policies are therefore not
only permissible but required as a matter of justice. "Thus over time a society
is to take steps at least to preserve the general level of natural abilities and
to prevent the diffusion of serious defects."
But
removing the coercion does not vindicate eugenics. The problem with eugenics and
genetic engineering is that they represent the one-sided triumph of willfulness
over giftedness, of dominion over reverence, of molding over beholding. Why, we
may wonder, should we worry about this triumph? Why not shake off our unease about
genetic enhancement as so much superstition? What would be lost if biotechnology
dissolved our sense of giftedness?
From a religious standpoint the answer
is clear: To believe that our talents and powers are wholly our own doing is to
misunderstand our place in creation, to confuse our role with God's. Religion
is not the only source of reasons to care about giftedness, however. The moral
stakes can also be described in secular terms. 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 as achievements for which we are
responsible. This would transform three key features of our moral landscape: humility,
responsibility, and solidarity.
In a social world that prizes mastery
and control, parenthood is a school for humility. That we care deeply about our
children and yet cannot choose the kind we want teaches parents to be open to
the unbidden. Such openness is a disposition worth affirming, not only within
families but in the wider world as well. It invites us to abide the unexpected,
to live with dissonance, to rein in the impulse to control. A Gattaca-like
world in which parents became accustomed to specifying the sex and genetic traits
of their children would be a world inhospitable to the unbidden, a gated community
writ large. The awareness that our talents and abilities are not wholly our own
doing restrains our tendency toward hubris.
Though some maintain that
genetic enhancement erodes human agency by overriding effort, the real problem
is the explosion, not the erosion, of responsibility. As humility gives way, responsibility
expands to daunting proportions. We attribute less to chance and more to choice.
Parents become responsible for choosing, or failing to choose, the right traits
for their children. Athletes become responsible for acquiring, or failing to acquire,
the talents that will help their teams win.
One of the blessings of seeing
ourselves as creatures of nature, God, or fortune is that we are not wholly responsible
for the way we are. The more we become masters of our genetic endowments, the
greater the burden we bear for the talents we have and the way we perform. Today
when a basketball player misses a rebound, his coach can blame him for being out
of position. Tomorrow the coach may blame him for being too short. Even now the
use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional sports is subtly transforming
the expectations players have for one another; on some teams players who take
the field free from amphetamines or other stimulants are criticized for "playing
naked."
The more alive we are to the chanced nature of our lot, the more
reason we have to share our fate with others. Consider insurance. Since people
do not know whether or when various ills will befall them, they pool their risk
by buying health insurance and life insurance. As life plays itself out, the healthy
wind up subsidizing the unhealthy, and those who live to a ripe old age wind up
subsidizing the families of those who die before their time. Even without a sense
of mutual obligation, people pool their risks and resources and share one another's
fate.
But insurance markets mimic solidarity only insofar as people do
not know or control their own risk factors. Suppose genetic testing advanced to
the point where it could reliably predict each person's medical future and life
expectancy. Those confident of good health and long life would opt out of the
pool, causing other people's premiums to skyrocket. The solidarity of insurance
would disappear as those with good genes fled the actuarial company of those with
bad ones.
The fear that insurance companies would use genetic data to
assess risks and set premiums recently led the Senate to vote to prohibit genetic
discrimination in health insurance. But the bigger danger, admittedly more speculative,
is that genetic enhancement, if routinely practiced, would make it harder to foster
the moral sentiments that social solidarity requires.
Why, after all,
do the successful owe anything to the least-advantaged members of society? The
best answer to this question leans heavily on the notion of giftedness. The natural
talents that enable the successful to flourish are not their own doing but, rather,
their good fortune a result of the genetic lottery. If our genetic endowments
are gifts, rather than achievements for which we can claim credit, it is a mistake
and a conceit to assume that we are entitled to the full measure of the bounty
they reap in a market economy. We therefore have an obligation to share this bounty
with those who, through no fault of their own, lack comparable gifts.
A lively sense of the contingency of our gifts a consciousness that none of
us is wholly responsible for his or her success saves a meritocratic society
from sliding into the smug assumption that the rich are rich because they are
more deserving than the poor. Without this, the successful would become even more
likely than they are now to view themselves as self-made and self-sufficient,
and hence wholly responsible for their success. Those at the bottom of society
would be viewed not as disadvantaged, and thus worthy of a measure of compensation,
but as simply unfit, and thus worthy of eugenic repair. The meritocracy, less
chastened by chance, would become harder, less forgiving. As perfect genetic knowledge
would end the simulacrum of solidarity in insurance markets, so perfect genetic
control would erode the actual solidarity that arises when men and women reflect
on the contingency of their talents and fortunes.
Thirty-five
years ago Robert L. Sinsheimer, a molecular biologist at the California Institute
of Technology, glimpsed the shape of things to come. In an article titled "The
Prospect of Designed Genetic Change" he argued that freedom of choice would vindicate
the new genetics, and set it apart from the discredited eugenics of old.
To implement the older eugenics ... would have required a massive social programme carried out over many generations. Such a programme could not have been initiated without the consent and co-operation of a major fraction of the population, and would have been continuously subject to social control. In contrast, the new eugenics could, at least in principle, be implemented on a quite individual basis, in one generation, and subject to no existing restrictions.
This is Meaghen Gonzalez, Editor of CERC. I hope you appreciated this piece. We curate these articles especially for believers like you.
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Acknowledgement
Michael J. Sandel. "The Case Against Perfection." The Atlantic Monthly Vol. 293, No. 3 (April, 2004).
Republished with permission of the author, Michael J. Sandel and The Atlantic Monthly.