Isn't that what you wanted?

Against Perfection: Michael Sandel

More technology, more everything

More technology means more prosperity: more industry, employment, opportunities, health, entertainment, wealth ... everything. Ultimately, more life and flourishing, for everyone. That's good, right? Everything's up for grabs: modifying the weather; creating new islands; re-writing human genes; changing reproduction; everything in between. So what's wrong with that? Why not use technology to make things better?

What about, for example, using science to bring about the most physically and intellectually desirable children? Isn't that what you want?

Twenty years ago, Harvard professor Michael Sandel wrote about the moral issues in genetic modification of children. Underlying them is the realisation that the pursuit of perfection changes our relationship to the world as we find it, and not in a good way.

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Michael Sandel: The Case against Perfection. The Atlantic Monthly, April 2004

https://cyber.harvard.edu/cyberlaw2005/sites/cyberlaw2005/images/Case_Against_Perfection.pdf

"Though there is much to be said for this argument [that enhancement diminishes the agency of the person, and consequently their achievements], I do not think that 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 recognise that our talents and powers are not wholly our own doing, despite the effort we expend to develop and to exercise them. It is to recognise 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 a certain humility. It is in part a religious sensibility. But its resonance reaches beyond religion."

Parenthood, more than any other human relationships, teaches an openness to the unbidden.

"The ethic of giftedness, under siege in sports, persists in the practice of parenting. But here, too, bio-engineering 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 parent cannot be held wholly responsible for the kind of children they have. This is why parenthood, more than any 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 the 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 honours 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 or 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 to quietistic if it slackens into mere acceptance of the child as he is." Parents have a duty to promote their child's excellence.

These days, however, overly ambitious parents are prone to get carried away with transforming love - promoting and demanding all manner of achievements 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 ultimately neglect. Transforming love, without accepting love, badgers and finally rejects." May finds these competing impulses a parallel with modern science: it, too, engages us in beholding the given world, studying and savouring it, and also in moulding the world, transforming and perfecting it.

The mandate to mould 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 (providing 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 towards 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 mould and manage their children's academic careers….

…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 enhacement.

There is something appealing, even intoxicating, about a vision of human freedom unfettered by the given.

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."

"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."

"There is something appealing, even intoxicating, about a vision of human freedom unfettered by the given. It may even be the case that the allure of that vision played a part in summoning the genomic age into being. It is often assumed that the powers of enhancement we now possess arose as an inadvertent by-product of medical progres - the genetic revolution came, so to speak, to cure disease, and stayed to tempt us with the prospect of enhancing our performance, designing our children, and perfecting our nature. That may have the story backwards. It is more plausible to view genetic engineering as the ultimate expression of our resolve to see ourselves astride the world, the masters of our nature. But that promise of mastery is flawed. It threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a gift, and to leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will."