one. But Sandel?s egalitarian fatalism already feels a bit 20th-century. The older half of me shares his dismay that some parents feel blamed for carrying babies with Down syndrome to term. But my younger half cringes at his flight from the ?burden of decision? and ?explosion of responsibility? that come with our expanding genetic power. Given a choice between a world of fate and blamelessness and a world of freedom and responsibility, I?ll take the latter. Such a world may be, as Sandel says, too daunting for the humans of today. But not for the humans of tomorrow. Sandel thinks this vision of freedom is flawed. Part of freedom, he argues, ?consists in a persisting negotiation with the given.? To abolish the given by re-engineering not only our world but also ourselves would ?leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will.? This is a profound insight. But it?s not fatal to freedom. It?s fatal to perfection. 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