Sandel's The Case Against Perfection: Rhetorical Analysis

In “The Case Against Perfection”, Michael J. Sandel gives his argument whether genetic coding is effective or ineffective. Sandel talks about genetic knowledge that people have learned overtime through scientific research and how this can be used to influence our species by intensifying our muscles and our minds and to choose the sex and height of our children. Sandel’s essay is effective because he looks at it from both the scientific side and the religious side, he makes valid points about how genetic coding will affect the height and muscles of individuals, he believes that genetic coding takes away the task of each child developing their own personality, and he argues that an eight cell organism is considered an abortion, if killed. In
Genetic coding allows parents to pick and choose the sex of their baby, the height that their baby will be, how athletic the baby will grow up to be and as genetic coding happens more and more, the more things that we will be able to modify through genetic coding takes away the opportunity that each child will grow up to be whatever/whoever they want to be. Sandel says it best when he says, “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” (Sandel 128), that we should accept and love our children for who they are, to teach them right from wrong and then from there, let them make their own
Sandel says, “For couples undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF), it is possible to choose the sex of the child before the fertilized egg is implanted in the womb” (127). In vitro fertilization allows the fertilized egg to be tested to see what sex the baby is. If the egg turns out to be a different sex than what the woman wants, the option to abort it arises. Those who believe that an embryo is a person, reject embryo screening for the same reasons they reject abortion. If an eight-cell embryo growing in a petri dish it is morally equivalent to a fully developed human being, then discarding it is no better than aborting a fetus, and both practices are equivalent to infanticide. Genetic coding plays a big role in life expectancy. There is still a lot of research to be done and test to be performed, thus making genetic coding unsafe for the time being. Until further research is performed, we do not know the life expectancy of someone who has been fully genetically modified, nor do we know about any health problems related to genetic coding. As genetic coding is researched and tested more, maybe one day it will be safe and legal to