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Far from perfect.

Article Excerpt
The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, by Michael J. Sandel (Harvard, 176 pp., $18.95)

ADVERTISEMENTS offering $50,000 for Ivy League ova; an athlete running a three-minute mile; a deaf lesbian couple selecting a deaf sperm donor to produce a deaf child; "Viagra for the brain" to improve memory--these are just some of the scenarios that Michael Sandel asks us to consider in his new book The Case against Perfection.

He recognizes that most readers--while these prospects make them uncomfortable--aren't up to the task of explaining why: "When science moves faster than moral understanding, as it does today, men and women struggle to articulate their unease." He doesn't blame them, though; our "moral vertigo" is the fault of modern moral and political philosophers who have artificially narrowed their focus.

That insight is actually Sandel's most important contribution to bioethics discussions. He says professional bioethicists need to broaden their discourse: "The familiar categories of autonomy and rights, on the one hand, and the calculation of costs and benefits, on the other" are inadequate. Only by reintroducing ultimate questions about our purpose, nature, and fulfillment can we successfully evaluate the ethics of human enhancement. Sandel, of course, knows why these have been excluded: "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."

This isn't exactly a new...