The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”
—Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar
One crucial issue at stake in discussions of enhancement is whether the “tune” of change is “beyond us yet ourselves” or beyond us in a way that alters our essential nature, our humanity. There is a strong lobby against changeable tunes. Arguments against human enhancement tend to be conservative, they express suspicion of change, emphasize the virtue of things as they are and acceptance of those things. In “The case against perfection: what’s wrong with designer children, bionic athletes, and genetic engineering”2 Michael J. Sandel makes an eloquent case against enhancement and insists on a position which is in effect “A tune upon the blue guitar / Of things exactly as they are.”
Sandel does not follow many popular writers in talking simplistically as if the attempt to “design” children was necessarily a quest for “the perfect child.” He is aware that this idea is incoherent. There is no such thing as perfection, not least because there is no agreed or even agreeable account of what human perfection might consist in. There are, however, imperfections aplenty and the attempt to minimize these is Sandel’s real target.
[i]n 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.
This is unconvincing; many contemporary writers are concerned with enhancement in one way or another and to have a view on the enhancement of human beings is to have a view about “the proper stance of human beings toward the given world.” Indeed, to have a view about the legitimacy of medicine and medical research, mainstream subjects of inquiry for more than 2,500 years,3 also involves “the proper stance of human beings toward the given world.” As we shall see, there are substantial problems in making sense of the idea of “the given world” when so much of human history has been concerned with attempts to improve upon the given, whether by animal husbandry, farming, plant breeding, irrigation, architecture, or in a myriad of other ways. We will ignore the “given world’s” attempts to improve upon itself through an evolutionary process of which (arguably) enhancement is a part.
Sandel starts by considering some examples of enhancement and dismissing many poor arguments that have been leveled against the enterprise of enhancement. Having dismissed what he thinks of, often appropriately, as the poor arguments, Sandel sets out to provide better arguments against enhancement:
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.
This claim seems doubtful for a number of reasons. The first is that it draws an odd and unexamined distinction between self-improvement which involves greater effort and that which involves lesser effort. In short, it is not rational to think that only effortful rather than effortless superiority counts.
I may try, for example, to improve my health by strenuous exercise and improve my chances of longevity by practising extreme dietary restriction. Both of these require effort, willpower, and continual if not continuous application and determination. These clearly meet the Sandel test. But suppose, as already noted, I prudently take aspirin and statins to minimize cholesterol and protect the cardiovascular system and I follow the attractive, but also beneficial, “Mediterranean diet”? These do not require much effort on my part, but surely I am responsible for these acts of mine and their effects. I hope the admiration I deserve for taking care of myself does not shift from me to my pharmacist or to my purveyors of fresh fruit, vegetables, red wine, and olive oil. I am no less the agent in these choices than in my choice of exercise or dietary restriction. The same goes for practice and steroids. Even steroid-enhanced athletes need the maximum degree of practice and training to have a chance of winning both against their competitors who don’t also take enhancing drugs and against those who do. Isn’t it rather that effort is still needed but the athletes start from a higher threshold? Authentic human agency is not proportional to the effort required to be an agent.
If, in the far future, there are drugs or other enhancements that might enable athletes or sportsmen to score literally effortlessly without the necessity to add anything by way of skill, effort, or training, this would clearly abolish competition and any excitement it engenders. Whether this would be unethical or simply boring is another question of course. For my part I can see no place for the ethical to get a grip here except perhaps if the most severe versions of egalitarianism are right, in which case such enhancements would be mandatory for all. For, as W. S. Gilbert so eloquently pointed out:
In short whoever you may be,
To this conclusion you’ll agree,
When everybody’s somebodee,
Then no one’s anybody!4
Sandel recognizes the comparative weakness of the argument from effort so he digs deeper:5
The deeper danger is that they (genetic enhancements) 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.
There are many problematic claims here. Why, for example, do we have to recognize and accept the gifted nature of normalcy but not the gifted nature of disease? An obvious answer is of course that it is rational to be choosy. But the choosy, if they are rational or fastidious, do not select on the basis of giftedness. So what is the basis for the differential acceptability of gifts? Sandel appeals to the problematic notion of honor and the complex notion of human “flourishing.” He says, “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.” We will return to some of these issues later; for the moment we should record that Sandel’s point cannot be that we must welcome the “gifted quality of life” only when it permits a child’s (or an adult’s?) natural capacities to flourish, because arguably enhancements do this when they enhance, improve upon, our “given” capacities. Do I flourish more or honor nature more if I protect myself against smallpox by vaccination or against cancer (we may hope) by a genetically engineered cell manipulation which confers immunity to cancer? Sandel is clearly issuing a general invitation to appreciate the gifted quality of life and, presumably, not to look gifted horses in the mouth even when those horses are a whiter shade of pale!6
Surely we can recognize that “our talents and powers are not wholly our own doing, despite the effort we expend to develop and to exercise them” without committing ourselves to abjuring modifications which clearly are our own for the doing, and which would further enhance those (initially) unbidden powers and capacities.
When it is claimed that “not everything in the world is open to whatever use we may desire or devise,” it is unclear what Sandel thinks he is saying. What is “not open” and what sort of locks are we talking about or what sort of closure are we looking for? The answer seems to be that the locks are powerful moral objections,7 but what is the content of these objections? It seems to be the assertion that if there is one justified constraint, it is true that “not everything in the world is open to whatever use we may desire or devise,” but nothing follows as to which things are not open in this way. Sandel seems to think the identification of the closed options is related to accepting or rather celebrating giftedness and “a certain humility.” But why should we accept either of these? I personally do not regard humility as a virtue. Those who do have reason to find fault with my character, but the issue here is not the question of whether or not I am (or anyone is) less than perfect, or whether humility is a virtue or a vice,8 but the question of whether or not I am to be free to be less humble than others and, if not more “gifted,” at least cleverer or fitter if the technology is there to assist me.
Now, Sandel has a rather bizarre gloss on these ideas. He says:
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?
That’s a poser! I don’t see any grounds for rational choice here, but Sandel knows the answer. Before looking at the answer we should note that there is also a somewhat spurious distinction employed here, since in most sports9 “grafters” build on some natural talent and the ultra gifted usually also have to practice, train, and keep fit.
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.
It is doubtful that drugs do provide a way to win without effort—athletes who use drugs must also train hard and have a high level of skill—but let that pass. It is odd that, having extolled the virtues of effort in an argument against enhancement, which admittedly Sandel admits is not decisive, Sandel then turns to praise of effortlessness.10
We do not, I believe, believe that “excellence consists at least partly in the display of natural talents and gifts.” We may believe that sports should embody the display of natural gifts to some extent, but that is part of another argument. Excellence is being better, or rather best! The excellent in sports are the fastest, the strongest, the most skillful—those who score most goals, runs, home runs, points, or whatever—they are those who win, not necessarily those who win by displaying their natural gifts. Moreover, I don’t think Sandel has a plausible notion of agency; excellence is not just something we are gifted, but rather it is something we do, something we are responsible for, something that is down to us. But as I have argued, this is the case when we make choices that have these effects. It is our choices for which we are responsible: not only our effortful choices but also our effortless ones, and not only our naturally gifted choices but our winning or successful choices that display other abilities. An interesting question is whether or not “luck” is a natural talent, a gift or even the result of wise choices. Napoleon is supposed to have prized “lucky generals”11 but whether they were simply fortunate, or fortunate because brave or for other reasons, will never be known. What we can say is that luck is attributed to them on the basis of the decisions they made.
Sandel is just wrong to associate excellence with the natural; excellence has to do with excellence, with being very good, or being the best! Praise for excellence is appropriate when the agent is responsible for the excellence she achieves. He writes:
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.12
Again it seems highly arbitrary to stipulate an account of authentic athletic competition which has as a necessary condition a highly artificial account of the natural.
Athletic competition is a human activity that honors the cultivation and display, not simply or even principally of natural talents, but of all talents, of all of those things for which we are responsible, either because they are ours (naturally) or ours because we have made them ours by our free choices.
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.”13
Now, illnesses are unbidden, as are accidents, invasions by parasites and viruses and for that matter terrorists and foreign forces. I cannot see any obvious, or even subtle, merit in openness to the unbidden. Sandel has an answer to this too. He says:
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.
Openness to the unbidden is, according to Sandel, good when it is part of a nondisfiguring relationship between parent and child.
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.
Now we have to be open to the unbidden only when it is part of a nondisfiguring relationship between parent and child which does not desecrate nature but honors it. This is pure Humpty Dumpty! Sandel has piled up the resonant but opaque images until even Alice would feel at home in his wonderland, with words meaning just what you want them to mean.14 While few would admit to deliberately desecrating nature, we are entitled to more by way of an account of why honoring nature in Sandel’s sense is an obligation and why improving upon it artificially is a desecration, except when it is to cure or prevent illness. We need among many other things from Sandel a non-question-begging account of honor and desecration.
I have suggested that there is a continuum between treating dysfunction and enhancing function which invites us to consider the benevolent motives and life-enhancing outcomes of both.15 I will not defend that again now, but for the moment we may simply note that Sandel stipulates a difference, gives resonant labels to the activity on each side of the distinction (“desecration” and “honoring”), but provides no arguments supporting the attachment of these labels or as to the meaning of the concepts as he employs them. Nor does he show how the activities they purport to describe merit such labels. He obviously regards it as self-evident, but alas, saying so does not make it so.
Sandel covers many other issues and has some interesting but inconclusive excursions into political philosophy and what he calls “bioethics,” perhaps to distinguish that activity from his own way of philosophizing. He returns, at the last, to his former pairings of labels and, in fine rhetorical style, piles on a few more for good measure:
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.
It is true that an enhanced sense of human agency coupled with the reality of increased powers to influence the way the world is, and the ways it will be in the future, may transform our understanding of key features of our moral landscape. But to fail to recognize and respond to changes in the landscape is a recipe for disaster and it is difficult, perhaps impossible anymore, to view a world that we could change as anything other than a world for which we are responsible. When chasms open before us, only those open to the unbidden will walk straight on over the edge. The truth is that our understanding of the scope of our responsibility in and for the world including our responsibilities to and for our children has radically and rightly changed in recent times.16
Sandel is almost right when he says:
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.
But it is not failure of humility that has this effect, but a better understanding of responsibility in the presence of real and unavoidable choices.
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.
This may be, but seeing ourselves in this way is an illusion; we may not be wholly responsible for the way we are, but our responsibility for the choices that have made us that way is inescapable:
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.
Again true, but inescapable: the burdens of responsibility are our fate as choosing autonomous beings. But mastery is the power to do things, not the exercise of that power. I am master of my fate if I can choose, not only if I do choose. I determine my destiny as much by declining or neglecting to exercise my mastery as by exercising it. This is a crucial point. Responsibility is a dimension of the ability to choose, not simply of a particular exercise of choice. The power of choice brings with it the burden of responsibility for the way we exercise choice, because choosing not to act is still a choice for which we are responsible. We cannot escape that burden by declining the recognition of our mastery of our fate or by choosing not to make decisions rather than making them in a particular way. Sandel seems to be recommending the use of Joo Janta 200 Super Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses® as patented by Douglas Adams in the second of his five-part Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.17 These sunglasses are “specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you”18 and thereby protect the wearer from the troubling necessity to take notice of (and hence to choose whether or not to act upon) any peril that threatens. The sunglasses may save the wearer from noticing the peril that she is in, but she is still responsible for wearing the glasses and for the consequences of so doing.19 Sandel seems here to be recommending the equivalent. By refusing to use powers that we already possess, we somehow are supposed to be able to escape the responsibility of choosing (or not) to deploy them in particular circumstances. And what is true of individuals is true of societies; when a society denies individuals the opportunity of choices they could have, it takes upon itself that responsibility and in a democracy that responsibility is shared, it is collective.20 A shared burden may be easier to bear but it is still a burden and the responsibility for that burden is not avoided.
The final point I wish to address concerns Sandel’s linkage of moral obligation to the notion of giftedness:
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.
Here Sandel is asking a big question and giving a small answer. No political theory I know of, nor indeed any theory of just taxation, requires us to share our gifts but keep our earnings. Indeed, income tax is predicated on the justice of sharing our earnings. It is true that governments sometimes levy so-called “windfall” taxes on unexpected “gifts” but these are rare and widely perceived as unjust. The best answers to the question of what the successful owe to the least advantaged (by, for example, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Rawls, Sen, Dworkin) do not conspicuously rely on the notion of giftedness. If we have a moral obligation to prevent harm to our fellows or indeed to do them good (to enhance them), if we owe or feel solidarity or compassion or justice or charity or altruism to others, it is surely not because what we have to give to others to discharge this obligation cost us nothing in the first place—was a “gift” or came “unbidden” or unearned. This is mean-spiritedness taken to the extremes that only unbridled capitalism could tolerate.
More probably, however, Sandel is appealing here to so-called “luck-egalitarianism”21, which holds that where people are worse off than others through no fault of their own they are therefore owed some form of compensation. However, if through my choices I ensure that my children are worse off than others either because I do not select against disability or disadvantage or because by failing to enhance them I leave them relatively deprived, I have created the very unfairness which Sandel says creates an “obligation to share” our “bounty with those who, through no fault of their own, lack comparable gifts.” Surely it is more sensible to reduce the necessity to redistribute by creating individuals who are lucky rather than unlucky and therefore are more likely to possess a bounty that is shareable with others. Nothing in my own defense of enhancement begs the question against luck-egalitarians. Rather, enhancement provides more to redistribute and less need for redistribution. The more enhancement, the less bad luck and the more products of good fortune there are available for redistribution.22
This is Sandel’s final flourish:
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 biomedical progress—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.
This is of course an overstatement. But while the threats he sees are plausible, they are not compelling. We can equally affirm things within the choice, responsibility, and will of men. When we acknowledge that we are standing on the shoulders of giants we affirm what is within our will; when we acknowledge that we have an evolutionary inheritance upon which we can build we have something to affirm outside our own will. But suppose there comes a time when the given, unbidden inheritance is all but extinguished? What we then say will depend on our qualities of life and of mind. But these will not be better or worse in proportion to our responsibility for them anymore than the magnitude of a disaster is determined by whether or not it is natural or man-made, bidden or unbidden.
Humpty Dumpty, of whose approach Sandel’s paper is so resonant, should have the last word:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”23
And that really is the main issue I take with Sandels’s poetic defense of the unbidden. If all that was at stake was Sandel’s world view, or that of those who favor enhancements, there would be less need to take issue with his approach, with all its elegance and rhetoric. But Sandel is offering not only arguments to prefer his world view and reject another, but arguments to prefer his world view and outlaw another; he is preparing the ground for those who care “which is to be master.” I am happy for Sandel to welcome the unbidden and accept all the gifts that come his way, including “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” which characteristically come out of the blue. But I wonder if he will let me and others choose the enhancements we prefer for ourselves and those which we judge best for our children? If he will, that is all well and good, but others will use his arguments to outlaw the option of enhancement. Those who wish to avail themselves of enhancements may wish to be master in one sense. They wish to be masters of their own destinies; I wish to be master of my destiny. But I, and I believe others who would wish to be free to choose enhancements, do not wish to be master in that other repressive, tyrannical sense of controlling the lives of others. Sandel can have the unbidden and welcome, but on condition he will let me and others have access to the bidden.