"The Case Against Perfection"

Here is Will Saletan's review of Michael Sandel's "The Case Against Perfection."  Here's the end:

In a world without givens, a world controlled by bioengineering, we would dictate our nature as well as our practices and norms. We would gain unprecedented power to redefine the good. In so doing, we would strip perfection of its independence. Its meaning would evolve as our nature and our ideals evolved. The more successfully we engineered I.Q. and muscle-to-fat ratio, the more central these measures would become to our idea of perfection. We already see this phenomenon in our shift of educational emphasis from character to academic testing. We might create a world of perfect SATs, E.R.A.’s and C.E.O.’s. But it would never be a perfect world, because the point of perfection is that its definition doesn’t bend to our will.

This is the real problem with self-engineering. It seizes control of humanity so radically that humanity can no longer judge it. We can’t be certain it’s diminishing us. But we can’t be certain it’s perfecting us, either.