Future of Human Nature Book

The Future of Human Nature is Habermas' sole foray into bioethics. It is also a bit of an anomaly in his body of work. Habermas has spent his career insisting on the distinction between ethics (Sittlichkeit) and morality (Moralität). Ethics, is his parlance, has to do with the good life and always refers to the self-understanding of a particular individual or group. It is therefore bound up with and contingent upon questions of identity. The province of morality, on the other hand, is not the good, but the right. Morality has to do with questions of justice, i.e. of the treatment due to every human being, irrespective of personal or cultural self-understanding. These, he thinks, are universal.

Since Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983) at least, Habermas has maintained, following John Rawls, that questions about the good life are beyond the reach of philosophical argument. Whether one should adopt an ascetic or hedonistic lifestyle, whether one should orient one's life toward individual self-fulfillment or subordinate one's own interests to the demands of tradition are not, for Rawls and Habermas, properly philosophical questions. The task of practical philosophy is to specify the "moral point of view" from which we may test the validity of moral norms and to articulate the formal procedure by which we do so.

It comes as somewhat of a surprise, therefore, that counter to his own interdiction, Habermas spends the better part of The Future of Human Nature addressing an explicitly ethical question. For questions regarding the treatment of pre-personal life do not, in his view, pose any problems from the point of view of justice proper. To justify this foray into the ethical, he develops the notion of a Gattungsethik - an ethic of the human species - which does not concern the self-understanding of a particular cultural or ethnic group, but that of the human species as a whole.

This self-understanding of human beings qua human beings, Habermas believes, falls within the province of philosophy. It may best be understood with reference to the Kierkegaardian notion of "being-oneself": the ability of human beings self-critically to appropriate their past in light of their future possibilities and so to take responsibility for themselves and their actions. He stresses that the institution of morality as a set of rights and duties is rooted in this understanding of ourselves as the responsible authors of our own biographies. In this way, the Gattungsethik of being-oneself is a condition of possibility for morality proper.

Habermas' concern in The Future of Human Nature is not with biotechnologies in general, but more particularly with genetic intervention. He distinguishes between intervening into the genome of an embryo with therapeutic intent (negative eugenics) and intervening into it with ameliorative intent (positive eugenics). When such procedures are left unregulated by the state, the decision whether to intervene with ameliorative intent is left to the discretion of the parents and is made contingent upon their preferences regarding the kind of child they wish to raise. This state of affairs is what Habermas calls "liberal eugenics."

In Habermas' view, this situation threatens to undermine our understanding of ourselves as the sole authors of our actions. By intervening irreversibly into an embryo's genome and favouring certain abilities and aptitudes, parents become co-determinants of their child's future. Of course, a child's familial and societal milieus already do largely co-determine the direction of her life. Nonetheless, Habermas believes that there is a crucial difference between, on the one hand, a child's education, to which it must assent and which it can always in principle reject or revise in adulthood, and on the other, irreversible genetic intervention, which is not available for the child to recast or reject in the future. He fears that, upon reaching adulthood, the child who has been altered in this way may be unable to view herself as solely responsible for her actions, and so to view herself as morally autonomous.

In this way, a child may come to hold her parents responsible for her character and actions, be they positive or negative. However, in a world marked by liberal eugenics, this deferral of responsibility could extend even to cases of non-intervention. Where intervention is the norm, it may create an expectation, such that a child may blame her own shortcomings on her parents' failure to intervene in her genome. This one-sided parent-child relationship might undermine the equality that obtains in principle between any two given human beings and that constitutes another condition of possibility of morality.

Thus far, it is difficult to disagree with Habermas' take on the situation. There is little doubt that genetic intervention might undermine our own sense of responsibility and make it difficult to relate to each other as equals. However, there is a tension between, on the one hand, the conviction that we have in some sense to preserve the understanding of ourselves as responsible agents, and on the other, the claim that this self-understanding does not fall into the province of morality proper, but into that of ethics.

This tension is unavoidable, since Habermas takes the equality and autonomy that constitute this Gattungsethik to be conditions for - and therefore logically prior to - morality. But it also forces him to concede, as the only reason for preserving this self-understanding, that we desire to maintain our moral practices, that we think that, in the absence of such practices, life would be unbearable to us. In this way, he makes morality dependent on the choice of a way of life, a procedure that he explicitly rejects in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. This about-face with respect to his earlier position gives the impression that he has painted himself into a corner with his perhaps undue insistence on the distinction between ethics and morality.

A further point of contention resides in Habermas' largely undefended conviction that our self-understanding is inextricably linked to our attitude to pre-personal life. It is this conviction that underlies his support for current German legislation forbidding embryo experimentation and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), not to mention his conceptualization of abortion in terms of a conflict between the protection due to the unborn child and the mother's right to self-determination. Habermas' position on this point seems to me entirely implausible. I fail to see how viewing the embryo or the fetus as a bundle of cells requiring no special protection would entail any modification of our attitude to or treatment of human adults who possess preferences and self-consciousness that is simply unavailable to an embryo or fetus.

Habermas' conviction that protection is due not only to the unborn child, but even to the egg that has been fertilized specifically with a view to experimentation seems to me to have more to do with the values of postwar German society than it does with any convincing philosophical reasoning. This difference in sensitivity between German and North American cultures goes a long way toward explaining the bafflement with which The Future of Human Nature has been received by Anglo-American philosophers, who tend to view such questions through the Lockean lens of personal freedom. I personally find this liberal take on the matter to be highly problematic, though unlike Habermas, I would reject it on moral, not ethical, grounds.

It is perhaps no surprise for someone who remembers the horrors of 1930s-1940s Germany to cling so desperately to such ideals as the human dignity and equality of respect, even when they are not obviously relevant to the situation at hand. Nonetheless, there is in principle no reason to assume that such practices as embryo experimentation and PGD would lead to moral insensitivity where human adults are concerned. On this point, I am much more likely to side with Peter Singer, who in Rethinking Life and Death (1995) submits such questions to much more rigorous analysis than Habermas does.