The Case Against Perfection

|

This seems to be an interesting book that came out earlier this summer.

The philosophical battle, as Sandel sees it, is between the Promethean aspiration to master nature, to take it and remold it into an image of our own making, and his own ethic centering on the "giftedness of human life" which holds that "our talents and powers are not wholly our own doing, nor even fully ours, despite the efforts we expend to develop and exercise them" and that "not everything in the world is [morally] open to any use we may desire or devise." (27) A significant implication of the "giftedness" approach is that children, too, should be seen as a gift and that some of our fundamental values are threatened when we do not respect that giftedness.

The Jesuit weekly America hosted a discussion between two medical ethics experts about the book on their website.

The New York Times review from Will Saletan, Slate's pro-choice hand-wringer, is here.

Harvard (where Sandel teaches) has a pdf excerpt from the book here.

Bookmark and Share

Pages

Mama-Lu's Etsy Shop

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Papa-Lu published on October 19, 2007 10:13 PM.

Ahhh... the 21st century was the previous entry in this blog.

Reverence is... is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.