The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering

Sandel imagines four ways that people might use genetic engineering in the future. The first is to create stronger muscles, which could help people maintain muscle tone as they age. The same technology could allow athletes to become extraordinarily strong. Assuming such therapies were safe, should enhanced athletes be banned from playing sports? Perhaps they would have an unfair advantage over their teammates. However, athletics is already inherently unfair, as some athletes are genetically stronger or faster than others. Sandel moves on to memory enhancement. Genetic therapies could be used to treat Alzheimer’s and dementia, but could also be used to enable people to learn and remember more effectively than their peers. Conversely, treatments could also soften or suppress traumatic memories. In all these cases, genetic engineering is likely to confer significant competitive advantages on those who undergo it—raising questions of social justice and equality given that, for the foreseeable future, these technologies are likely to remain prohibitively expensive for most of humanity. Sandel envisions a world where people are split into two classes: “the enhanced and the merely natural” (15). He questions whether such enhancements could be dehumanizing.

The third enhancement is height. It is already possible to make children taller with growth hormone injections. Currently, only children in the shortest height percentiles are eligible for this treatment; Sandel questions whether such a restriction is more ethical than allowing any child to become taller if they should wish. He also suggests that such enhancements might make shortness a marker of poverty. The last issue Sandel addresses is sex selection. In addition to aborting fetuses of the undesired sex, it is also possible to select embryos of a particular sex through a process called preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Those who oppose sex selection, because they oppose all abortions, do not make a particular argument about what is wrong with sex selection itself. Sex discrimination is another argument: Some places select against girls on a broad scale. Even if sex discrimination were not an issue, Sandel believes something would be wrong with sex selection.

Sandel turns his focus to bioengineering in athletics, noting that athletes whose skill comes partly from genetic engineering might have diminished agency: Perhaps the creator of the enhancements deserves part of the credit for their abilities.

While Sandel appreciates this argument, he actually believes the opposite: bioengineering gives people too much agency, allowing them to control themselves and the world they live in to an inappropriate degree. Athletes are impressive partly because of their natural gifts, and engineering would make those gifts less natural. They are also impressive because of the effort they put into becoming excellent; engineering could be a shortcut to success. However, he notes that bioengineering could instead be framed as the ultimate effort: a willingness to go to any lengths to change one’s body to better suit one’s sport.

Athletes change their bodies and gain advantages in many ways. Running shoes make running easier, but they do not undermine the skill involved in running. Tiger Woods had laser eye surgery, which improved his golf game, but doing so did not give him an unfair advantage. Some athletes try to gain advantages that go beyond these normative, comparatively accessible examples. For instance, they might take part in extremely rigorous training regimes or follow extreme diets. Sandel does not believe that these intense training alterations are meaningfully different from bioengineering. He argues that any intervention is objectionable if it compromises the integrity of a sport or game by failing to honor athletes’ natural abilities and by pushing them toward efforts that harm them and that undermine their sports.

Sandel distinguishes between sport and spectacle. Sport must honor athletes’ abilities and must have rules and regulations that celebrate the skills each game is meant to test. Wrestling is a sport, but the version of wrestling practiced in the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), where people hit each other with folding chairs, is a spectacle. Similar discussions exist in the music world, where some people believe it is unacceptable for pianists to take beta blockers that calm their nerves before a performance, while others argue that the definition of a great pianist need not include an ability to handle stage fright. Likewise, some people believe that microphones and audio technologies have transformed opera and Broadway musicals from art forms into spectacles. Sandel quotes Anthony Tommasini, who notes that lyrics in Broadway shows have become “less subtle and intricate” (40) than they used to be. 

Some people, like former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, have argued that sports do not have a point; their rules are arbitrary, so there is no need to parse which skills or abilities are central to a sport and which are incidental. Scalia made this argument when he objected to a golfer with a disability being permitted to ride a golf cart between holes; Sandel points out, however, that the ability to walk is not what golf is about. In his view, it is possible to draw a clear distinction between an integral skill, like the ability to drive the ball down the fairway, and an incidental one, like the ability to walk to where the ball lands. Bioengineering and invasive athletic enhancements are inappropriate because they promote a fundamental disregard for sports as an honest athletic competition and a celebration of excellence.