Nature makes mistakes. It endows us with degenerative diseases, missing limbs, faulty senses, warped spines, cleft palates, and severe mental defects. Even those fortunate enough to be born reasonably whole may still have to contend with the onset of malocclusion, hemophilia, arthritis, schizophrenia, and Tourette syndrome. Ride the subway in any major city, look around you, and you will see firsthand the painful provisions of, as Kant puts it, “a stepmotherly nature.”
Yet nature, which was parsimonious in so many ways, was generous in one great one: it gave us reason, and with that reason we would pry into it with every instrument of our devising and wrest away the means to control our fortunes, right down to the bodily defects that plague us. Was it wrong for us to…