Rethinking "liberal eugenics": Reflections and questions on habermas on bioethics

Hastings Center Report

Volumn 35, Issue 6, 2005, Pages 31-42

  Prusak, Bernard G ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 28644449049     PISSN: 00930334     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3528563     Document Type: Review

References (83)

1. Johannes Rau, "Berlin Oration," "Wird alles gut? Für einen Fortschritt nach menschlichem Maß," available online at www.bundespraesident.de/frameset/index.jsp.
2. For an account and analysis of the "Singer affair" and its aftermath, see B. Schöne-Seifert and K.-P. Rippe, "Silencing the Singer: Anti-Bioethics in Germany," Hastings Center Report 21, no. 6 (1991): 20-27.
3. For Singer's own account, see "Bioethics and Academic Freedom," Bioethics 4 (1990): 33-44 ,
4. reprinted in his Unsanctifying Human Life: Essays on Ethics, ed. H. Kuhse (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2002), 66-76.
5. See E. Brown, "The Dilemma of German Bioethics," The New Atlantis 5 (Spring 2004): 37-53 for an account of the last several years' controversies. The term "engineering" belongs in scare quotes because of the great differences between engineering artifacts out of lifeless materials for human use - as Hans Jonas remarks, "what is normally understood by 'engineering'" - and "engineering" human life.
6. For a discussion, see Jonas's "Biological Engineering - A Preview" in his Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), 142-46.
7. Schöne-Seifert and Rippe, "Silencing the Singer," 22.
8. Brown, "The Dilemma of German Bioethics," 48.
9. Schöne-Seifert and Rippe, "Silencing the Singer," 23.
10. Rau, "Wird alles gut?"
11. Schöne-Seifert and Rippe, "Silencing the Singer," 22.
12. Jürgen Habermas, Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur. Auf dem Weg zu einer liberalen Eugenik? (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001; expanded edition, 2002).
13. The expanded edition, which I cite in the following, includes a response by Habermas to several critics that originally appeared in the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 50 (2002): 283-98.
14. Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, tr. W. Rehg, M. Pensky, and H. Beister (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2003).
15. The English text also includes a translation of a speech by Habermas, "Faith and Knowledge."
16. For a discussion of the text in its German political context, see Thomas Assheuer and Jens Jessen's April 2002 interview with Habermas in Die Zeit, "Auf schiefer Ebene. Vor der Bundestagsdebatte: Ein Gespräch mit Jürgen Habermas über Gefahren der Gentechnik und neue Menschenbilder," available online at www.zeit.de/2002/05/Kultur/ 200205_habermasint.html.
17. Habermas, Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur, 158;
18. English trans., The Future of Human Nature, p. 96. All further references are given parenthetically in the body of the text as follows: (158/96). Translations are mine.
19. A. Buchanan et al., From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
20. Habermas belongs to Rau's generation and shares with him much the same intuitions. See, for example, Habermas's answer to the opening question of his recent interview with Nicolas Truong in Le Monde de l'éducation 290 (March 2001), "Un référendum pour une Constitution européenne," available online at www.lemonde.fr/mde/ete2001/ habermas.html. ("You were born in 1929: how have you - yourself and your thought - traversed this 'century of extremes'?")
21. Compare L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd, bilingual ed., tr. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell, 1958), pt. 1, sec. 123, p. 49.
22. N. Agar, "Liberal Eugenics" in Bioethics: An Anthology, ed. H. Kuhse and P. Singer (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1999), 171. All further references are given parenthetically in the body of the text as follows: (171).
23. J. Robertson, Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technologies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 167, quoted by Agar at 172-73 and Habermas at 87/49.
24. E. Parens, "Should We Hold the (Germ) Line?" Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 23 (1995): 173.
25. See also his "Is Better Always Good? The Enhancement Project," in Enhancing Human Traits: Ethical and Social Implications, ed. Erik Parens (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998), 12-14.
26. Parens, "Should We Hold the (Germ) Line?" 173.
27. Compare, for example, P. Kitcher, The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 245-54,
28. or R.C. Lewontin, "Cloning and the Fallacy of Biological Determinism" in Human Cloning: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy, ed. B. MacKinnon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 35-49.
29. See Buchanan et al., From Chance to Choice, 160-61.
30. Compare J. Harris, "Is Gene Therapy a Form of Eugenics?" in Bioethics: An Anthology, 166: "what constitutes a normal healthy life is determined in part by technological and medical and other advances (hygiene, sanitation, etc.)."
31. Kitcher, The Lives to Come, 208, 210, 212, 213-14.
32. See From Chance to Choice, 115-26.
33. Agar's formulation parallels John Rawl's two principles of justice; see A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 302-303.
34. N. Agar, "Designing Babies: Morally Permissible Ways to Modify the Human Genome," Bioethics 9 (1995): 13-14.
35. N. Agar, Bioethics Ibid., 10.
36. N. Agar, Bioethics Ibid., 14.
37. N. Agar, Bioethics Ibid., 14.
38. See Parens, "Is Better Always Good?" 5, 9-10.
39. Buchanan and colleagues propose that we recognize "natural primary goods" analogous to Rawls's "social primary goods," namely, "'general purpose' means useful or valuable in carrying out nearly any plan of life." (See A Theory of Justice, 92.) They then claim, following Joel Feinberg's "The Child's Right to an Open Future," that "parents have a responsibility to help their children . . . to develop capacities for practical judgment and autonomous choice, and to develop as well at least a reasonable range of the skills and capacities necessary to provide them the choice of a reasonable array of different life plans." Respecting the child's "right to an open future" - or in other words his "rights-in-trust" - does not rule out genetic enhancements, they judge, but it does require that genetic interventions do not unduly narrow the child's range of opportunities.
40. See From Chance to Choice, 167-71.
41. Feinberg's paper has been collected in his Freedom and Fulfillment: Philosophical Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 76-97.
42. Buchanan et al., From Chance to Choice, 168. They include the phrase "of normal humans" since they hold that the increase would be a benefit only if it were "functionally integrated with other cognitive capacities, as is normal memory."
43. D.S. Davis, "Genetic Dilemmas and the Child's Right to an Open Future," Hastings Center Report 27, no. 2 (1997): 14.
44. D.S. Davis, Hastings Center Report Ibid., 11, 14.
45. D.S. Davis, Hastings Center Report Ibid., 14.
46. See Davis's book, Genetic Dilemmas: Reproductive Technology, Parental Choices, and Children's Futures (New York: Routledge, 2001), 100-106.
47. Compare John Locke's classic account of "paternal power" in his Second Treatise of Government, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1980), ch. 6, secs. 52-76, pp. 30-42.
48. Agar, "Designing Babies," 10.
49. R. Dworkin, "Playing God: Genes, Clones, and Luck" in Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 448.
50. Habermas cites Dworkin's essay at 54/28. As Habermas is aware, his analysis of the existential "situation" of the person subjected to eugenic programming is much like Jonas's analysis of the existential situation of the human clone. See 108/62-63 and Jonas's "Biological Engineering" in his Philosophical Essays, 159-63.
51. As Andrew Lustig notes, there is a tendency in bioethical discussions "to restrict the range of our moral considerations by discounting appeals to imagination and intuition as merely 'speculative' musings." See his article "Immortality," Commonweal, February 13, 2004, 8.
52. By way of example, see Robertson, Children of Choice, 166, 168.
53. S. Hampshire, "Biology, Machines, and Humanity" in The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines, ed. J.J. Sheehan and M. Sosna (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 253.
54. Habermas has not always given much attention to our "bodiliness. " Instead, since the 1970s, his focus has been on the structure of linguistic communication, in explicit opposition to theorists who focus on the body. See in this regard his "Aus einem Brief an Helmuth Plessner, 1972" in Kultur und Kritik. Verstreute Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 232-35.
55. H. Plessner, Lachen und Weinen. Eine Untersuchung nach den Grenzen menschlichen Verhaltens in vol. 7 of his Gesammelte Schiften, Ausdruck und menschliche Natur, ed. G. Dux et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 240;
56. English translation, Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior, tr. J.S. Churchill and M. Grene (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 36. Note that Plessner purports to be describing our experience, not making a case for dualism.
57. Plessner, Lachen und Weinen, 242;
58. English trans., Laughing and Crying, 37.
59. Robertson, Children of Choice, 165-66.
60. Compare (or contrast) Leon Kass on what we might expect of parents who decided "to clone a Rubinstein"; see "Making Babies: The New Biology and the 'Old' Morality" in Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (New York: Free Press, 1985), 68-69.
61. See also From Chance to Choice, 177-78, quoted by Habermas at 106, n. 64/123, n. 52: "Even if an individual is no more locked in by the effects of a parental choice than he or she would have been by unmodified nature, most of us might feel differently about accepting the results of a natural lottery versus the imposed values of our parents. The force of feeling locked in may well be different."
62. See Agar, "Designing Babies," 14, and From Chance to Choice, 177-78 (quoted in the preceding note).
63. M. Sandel, "The Case against Perfection: What's Wrong with Designer Children, Bionic Athletes, and Genetic Engineering," The Atlantic Monthly, April 2004, 51.
64. See also From Chance to Choice, 91: Buchanan et al. claim that "[t]he fear . . . that an increasing knowledge of how genes will influence human nature will undermine our conception of ourselves as free" is "based on a mistaken assumption, namely, that an increase in knowledge of genetic causation can establish the truth of . . . Incompatibilist Determinism - the thesis that everything that happens has a cause and that universal causation excludes freedom." Habermas's version of "the autonomy argument" is not based on this assumption. His conception of autonomy is as compatible with "compatibilism" as with "libertarianism."
65. Kitcher, The Lives to Come, 279-80, 282.
66. Kitcher, The Lives to Come, Ibid., 279-81.
67. Kitcher largely follows Harry G. Frankfurt's "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971): 5-20, especially 15. According to Frankfurt, the statement that a person enjoys freedom of will "means that he is free to will what he wants to will, or to have the will that he wants."
68. As Habermas reports in his postscript, at a colloquium in New York in 2001 Ronald Dworkin challenged Habermas's argument by changing the terms of his "thought experiment." Habermas assumes throughout his text that the eugenically programmed person "understands herself as someone altered in some genetic characteristics, but remaining identical with herself, so that she can assume a hypothetical attitude toward the genetic intervention" (143/86). That is, she can intelligibly say, "You did X to me, but I wish you hadn't, and you shouldn't have. You've harmed me" - a charge that seems to require that the person understands herself as having been basically the same person then as she is now. But if, by contrast, "the genetic program stretches over the entire biological identity of a future person," making it "identity-generating" (145, 146/88, 89), the eugenically programmed person cannot intelligibly say, "You've harmed me." For, despite the fact that the person could still very well suffer from having been programmed, the fact is that she herself could not have been other than as she is, and so cannot point to a time when she herself was in a better condition. We have here an example of the so-called nonidentity problem. Habermas proposes sex or gender (Geschlecht) as an "an identity-generating characteristic," denying that a person can intelligibly "project her own identity back to a gender-neutral past." The question then is whether a case in which a persons sex and so identity have been genetically "engineered" is immune to all criticism.
69. For an account of Habermas's conception of autonomy, see M. Warren, "The Self in Discursive Democracy," in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. S.K. White (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 172-75, especially 172: "Habermas does not treat autonomy as something given to individuals by nature. . . . Rather, he conceptualizes autonomy in such a way that it is one developmental possibility embedded within social relations as such."
70. Habermas cites in this context Hannah Arendt's brief ruminations on "natality"; see 102-105/58-60 and Arendt's The Human Condition (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 9, 247.
71. Feinberg articulates "the self-determination circle" as follows: "If the grown-up offspring is to determine his own life, and be at least in large part the product of his own 'self-determination,' he must already have a self fully formed and capable of doing the determining. But he cannot very well have determined that self on his own, because he would have to have been already a formed self to do that, and so on, ad infinitum" - making it appear that self-determination is impossible. Feinberg's solution to the circle turns on the fact that "[i]t is an overstatement . . . that there is any early stage at which a child's character is wholly unformed and his talents and temperament entirely plastic, without latent bias or limit, and another that there can be no 'self-determination' unless the self that does the determining is already fully formed." What is crucial is that the child already has temperamental proclivities, in Feinberg's words, "by his very nature." Accordingly, "there is no point before which the child himself has no part in his own shaping." See "The Child's Right to an Open Future" in Freedom and Fulfillment, 94-97. The question to ask is whether the child could still see himself as self-determining if what he is "by his very nature" were itself a matter of determination to some extent by his parents.
72. Augustine, Confessions, ed. J.J. O'Donnell (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5-6;
73. English translation, Confessions, tr. F.J. Sheed (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1993), 6-7.
74. Parens, "Is Better Always Good?" 12.
75. Compare Kass, "The Age of Genetic Technology Arrives," in Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (San Francisco, Calif.: Encounter Books, 2002), 121-22, n. 2.
76. The non-medically-necessary administration of growth hormone - another of Robertson's examples of environmental manipulations that he deems to be "within parental rearing discretion" - seems to be similar to genetic manipulation inasmuch as they both cannot be undone. In the case of administration of growth hormone, however, the child can be consulted, though whether the child's wishes should be decisive is a difficult question. Should the child not want the growth hormone, surely it would be problematic to administer it anyway. But should the child want the growth hormone, it is not self-evident that the parents should comply. Robertson implies that, if it is within parental rearing discretion to administer growth hormone, then "genetic interventions to enhance normal offspring traits" ought likewise to be seen as "legitimate." He ignores the fact that the administration of growth hormone is problematic, which makes his conclusion about genetic interventions problematic, too.
77. Compare Jonas, "Biological Engineering," 160. As Habermas notes, this counter-argument applies as well to criticisms of Jonas's argument against cloning as turning on genetic determinism.
78. See, for example, From Chance to Choice, 197-98,
79. and B. Steinbock, "Cloning Human Beings: Sorting through the Ethical Issues," in Human Cloning: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy, 71-72.
80. D. Callahan, What Price Better Health? Hazards of the Research Imperative (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 162.
81. L. Siep, "Moral und Gattungsethik," Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 50 (2002): 116.
82. See Habermas's interview in Die Zeit. "Instead of a breach-in-the-dam," he responds to the opening question, "I would prefer to use the less strident picture of the 'downward path,' which one slides down because there is no longer any foothold." Habermas considers the question of the status of the embryo to be unanswerable in terms of "public reason" - for him, it is a metaphysical question (58-59/31).
83. Gavin Colvert and Patrick Corrigan suggested this objection to me in conversation.