In his influential and important essay “The Case Against Perfection,” (The Atlantic Monthly, 2004) and in his new book The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, (Harvard University Press, 2007) Michael Sandel argues that traditional moral principles, such as personal autonomy or the right to decide what happens in and to one’s body, can’t provide adequate explanations of our moral intuitions (where we have them) that genetic enhancements are mortally offensive. He proposes that three principles—being open to the unbidden, to refrain from mastering the mysteries of birth and of death and to accept that life is a gift—can provide satisfactory explanations of them. He suggests that these principles are moral principles and that they proscribe genetic enhancements. We contend that Sandel’s principles are vestiges of religious dogma that reflect a political agenda.

Our criticism of Sandel’s program of showing that his principles are moral principles is to point out that the paradigm cases of conforming to them—traditional marriage arrangements in Western societies—actually conform to them to a lesser extent than do some arrangements that have been opened up by current biotechnology, such as sperm banks. We go on to describe a case in which genetic enhancements are necessary for conforming to the principles, as well as a case where making healthy children diseased is necessary for conforming to the principles. We also argue that the principles are vague and incoherent and that the principle of being open to the unbidden is refuted by work, both old and new, in molecular biology.

Our diagnosis of the problem in Sandel’s argument is that he conflates instances of the category of morality with instances of the category of the natural. We would expect explanations of moral intuitions in terms of instances of the category of the natural to be hit-or-miss, depending upon the character of the specific cases involved, since such explanations hardly count as moral explanations.

Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University

Dr. Buechner is Director of the Bioethics Institute and Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University/Newark. He is Co-Director of the Merck Summer Institute on Bioethics (for honors students in the Newark public high-school system) and his book on the philosophical foundations of cognitive science will be published in late Fall, 2007, by The MIT Press. He works in bioethics, philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind and psychology. He is using multi-dimensional modal logics to model and analyze genetic regulatory networks.