MORALIZING HUMAN NATURE

                              

                                     MORALIZING HUMAN NATURE?

                                                                    Jürgen Habermas

Recent developments in biotechnology and genetic research are raising complex ethical questions which concern the legitimate scope and limits of genetic intervention. Thus as we begin to contemplate the possibility of intervening in the human genome to prevent diseases, we cannot help but feel that the human species might soon be able to take its biological evolution in its own hands. As a result playing God is the metaphor commonly used for this self-transformation of the species, which, it seems, might soon be within our grasp.

Today we all realize that due to the spectacular advances of molecular genetics, more and more of what we are by nature is coming within the reach of biotechnological intervention. Thus from the perspective of experimental sciences, this technological control of human nature is but another manifestation of our tendency to extend continuously the range of what we can control within our natural environment. From a life world perspective, however, our attitude changes as soon as this extension of our technological control crosses the line between outer and inner nature.

            Throughout our modern times, new technological developments have created new regulatory needs. Till this date, however, changes in normative regulation have been produced as adaptions to societal transformation. It has always been social change from technological innovation in the fields of production and exchange, communication and transport, the military, and medicine, which took the lead. Even the post traditional conceptions of law and morality have been described by classical social thinkers as a product of cultural and societal realization acting in the same direction as the advances of modern science and technology. Institutionalized research was perspective of the liberal state, the freedom of science and research is entitled to legal guarantees. Any enhancement of the scope and focus of the technological control of nature is bound up with the economic promise of gains in productivity and increasing prosperity, as well as with the political prospect of enlarging the scope of individual choice. And since enlarging the scope of individual choice fosters individual autonomy, science and technology have, to date, formed an evident alliance with the fundamental credo of liberalism, holding that all citizens are entitled to equal opportunities for an autonomous direction of their own lives.

             The wish to be autonomous in the conduct of one’s own life is always connected with the collective goals of health and of prolongation of lifespan. The history of medicine, therefore strongly suggests that skeptical attitude towards any attempt at “moralizing human nature”. Moralizing human nature here means dubious sanctification. After science and technology have enlarged the scope of our freedom this irresistible tendency is now to be brought to a standstill. 

            A quite different scenario, however, emerges if moralizing human nature is seen as the assertion of an ethical self-understanding of the species which is crucial for our capacity to see ourselves as the authors of our own life histories, and to recognize one another as autonomous persons. The attempt to rely on legal means to prevent liberal eugenics from becoming normalized and to ensure the contingency or naturalness of procreation that is of the fusion of the parents sets of chromosomes would then express something quite different from a vague antimodernistic opposition. 

            From a liberal perspective, the new reproductive technologies, like substituted organs or medically assisted suicide, are seen as increasing individual autonomy. We distinguish between what nature, including evolution, has created and what we, with the help of these genes, do in this world. In any case this distinction results in a line being drawn between what we are the way we deal, on our own account, with this heritage. Thus this decisive line between chance and choice is the back bone of our morality. Moreover we are afraid of the prospect of human beings designing other human beings, because this option implies shifting the line between chances and choice which is the basis of our value system.

            To say that genetic modification that have as their goal the enhancement of a human life are able to change the overall structure of our moral experience is a strong claim today. It can be understood to imply that genetic engineering will confront us in certain respect with practical question concerning some presupposing of moral judgment and action. Consequently shifting the line between chance and choice affects the self- understanding of persons who act on moral grounds and are concerned about their life as a whole. Whether or not we may see ourselves as the responsible authors of our own life history and recognize one another  as persons of equal birth that is of equal dignity, is also dependent on how we see ourselves anthropologically as members of the species.