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The Future of Human Nature
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by Jurgen Habermas,
Translated by Hella Beister
Polity Press
Due/Published
April 2003, 140 pages,
cloth
ISBN
0745629865
Habermas takes up the question of genetic engineering and its ethical implications. His analysis is guided by the view that genetic manipulation is closely tied to the identity and self-understanding of the species. He is particularly concerned with the question of how the biotechnological blurring of the distinction between the "grown" and the "made" may change our ethical self-understanding both as members of the species and as individuals. We cannot rule out the possibility that knowledge of one's own heredity will restrict the individual freedom and undermine the symmetrical relations between free and equal human beings. In the concluding chapter--which was first delivered as a lecture on receiving the 2001 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade--Habermas broadens the discussion to examine the tension between science and religion in the modern world, a tension that exploded on Sept. 11th. Contents
Publisher's Note
Foreword
Are There Postmetaphysical Answers to the Question: What is the "Good Life"?
The Debate on the Ethical Self-Understanding of the Species
I Moralizing human nature?
II Human dignity versus the dignity of human life
III The embedding of morality in an ethics of the species
IV The grown and the made
V Natality, the capacity of being oneself, and the ban on instrumentalization
VI The moral limits of eugenics
VII Setting the pace for a self-instrumentalization of the species?
Postscript
Faith and Knowledge
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Review
In the opening essay of The Future of Human Nature, Jurgen Habermas explores the distinction between a Kantian theory of justice and a Kierkegaardian ethics of subjectivity and proceeds to defend restraint in postmetaphysical thinking regarding substantive questions of the good life. More specifically, post-Kantian or postmetaphysical philosophy has shied away from offering binding or definitive answers to questions of morality and ethics. Yet, as Habermas argues, this does not necessarily prevent philosophers from exploring these issues, an activity that takes on greater urgency in the age of genetic engineering. Thus, in the subsequent essay, “The Debate on the Ethical Self-Understanding of the Species,” Habermas considers the philosophical, moral, and ethical questions raised by genetic engineering and eugenics. Habermas writes, “My perspective in this examination of the current debate over the need to regulate genetic engineering is therefore guided by the question of the meaning, for our own life prospects and for our self-understanding as moral beings, of the proposition that the genetic foundations of our existence should not be disposed over.” In The Future of Human Nature, Habermas offers a penetrating look at how gene manipulation raises questions about how we define ourselves as individuals and the morality of eugenics. Habermas skillfully blends a discussion of what the frequently divisive public discourse over genetics reveals about society’s misgivings about the individual and the human in the “posthuman age.” His essay also explores how secularist and religious viewpoints differ on the question of genetic engineering, a dichotomy he continues to examine in the concluding essay which was written in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. Habermas has taken on a difficult and controversial problem and it is no surprise that The Future of Human Nature has its fair share of detractors. Yet, his work offers a valuable benchmark from which to argue from, especially as moral and ethical opinion regarding genetics struggle to keep up with the technology.
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