Four contemporary writers have been prominent in expressing particularly strong opposition to enhancement: Michael Sandel, Leon Kass, Jürgen Habermas, and Francis Fukuyama. Others already considered have also produced arguments which impact on the legitimacy of enhancement, but in a more nuanced way. We have already examined Sandel’s arguments in some detail. In this chapter I will consider the case put by Kass and Habermas. Fukuyama I do not discuss in detail in this book, partly because his views have been examined effectively by Jonathan Glover1 and partly because his arguments are for the most part duplicated by those discussed in detail here.
Leon Kass has assayed a number of forays into the issues that surround enhancement. The most comprehensive account and perhaps the most expressive of his position is in an essay entitled “Ageless bodies, happy souls.”2
Kass starts by being almost right about enhancements. He is right when he says:
Needless arguments about whether or not something is or is not an “enhancement” get in the way of the proper question: What are the good and bad uses of biotechnological power? What makes a use “good” or even just “acceptable”? It does not follow from the fact that a drug is being taken solely to satisfy one’s desires that its use is objectionable. Conversely, certain inventions to restore what might seem to be natural functioning wholeness—for example, to enable postmenopausal women to bear children or 60-year-old men to keep playing professional ice-hockey—might well be dubious uses of biotechnological power.3
He then rehearses three obvious objections to enhancement that he believes fail. The first of these concerns safety, and Kass rightly comments that the “big issues have nothing to do with safety,” for while safety is a big issue it is not a special problem for enhancement technologies or treatments, rather than for, say, nonenhancing therapies. Second, Kass considers the issues of fairness (stealing an unfair advantage) and distributive justice: the question of the fairness of some people being able to access advantageous technologies while others are not. We have discussed these issues in chapters 1 and 2 and again Kass4 rightly says that “[t]he central matter is not equality of access, but the goodness or badness of the things being offered.”
Finally, Kass considers the issues of freedom and coercion. Here Kass seems on less firm ground. He notes that “[e]ven partial control over genotype … would add to existing social instruments of parental control and its risks of despotic rule. This is indeed one of the central arguments against human reproductive cloning: the charge of genetic despotism of one generation over the next.” As I have argued elsewhere,5 Kass is entirely wrong in this, there being no danger that human reproductive cloning would any more lead to despotism of one generation over another than does normal sexual reproduction. Sexual reproduction allows parents to determine a large part of the genome of potential offspring, and child rearing and education allow them the further license that the terms “care and control” of children imply. Since neither genotype nor parental wishes have significant impact on autonomy, these fears are somewhat exaggerated.6
Against this Kass notes that
[a]ttempts to alter our nature through biotechnology are different from both medicine and education or child-rearing. It seems to me that we can more-or-less distinguish the pursuit of bodily and psychic perfection from the regular practice of medicine.… When it functions to restore from deviation some natural wholeness of the patient, medicine acts as a servant and aid to nature’s own powers of self-healing. It is also questionable to conflate child-rearing and education of the young with the attitude that seeks willful control of our own nature. Parents do indeed shape their children, but usually with some at least tacit idea—most often informed by cultural teachings that have stood the test of time—of what it takes to grow up to live a decent, civilized, and independent life.7
Of course, most parents want their children to experience a decent, civilized, and independent life. But they also want willful control of the process, because they (probably) think they know best. Parents who would enhance their children think the same, informed by the same cultural teachings that have stood the test of time. Those teachings tell us to do the best for our kids and to give them whatever advantages we can.8 The claim that attempts to alter our nature through biotechnology are different from both medicine and education or child-rearing seems wholly implausible. Medicine uses technology and biotechnology; indeed, much of medicine is a part of technology, it is a technological genre. For the rest, what matters surely is the ethics of altering our nature, not the means that we adopt. If it’s right to alter our nature, we should choose the best and most reliable, not to mention the most efficient and economical, methods of so doing.
Kass offers nothing to replace the accounts of Boorse9 and Daniels10 critically discussed in chapter 3. There are distinctions in abundance, but distinctions with a moral difference are harder to find. No systematic account of relevant moral differences between biotechnological interventions and medical or social ones has been given by anyone and it seems doubtful that there could be such an account. There are, of course, moral differences between different sorts of interventions and these are the subject of the differences between Kass and myself. But these are not mirrored by the distinctions, such as they are, between therapy and enhancement nor between the normal and natural on the one hand and the artificial and unusual on the other. Recall that Kass himself has problems with this; he says that
certain inventions to restore what might seem to be natural functioning wholeness—for example, to enable postmenopausal women to bear children or 60-year-old men to keep playing professional ice-hockey—might well be dubious uses of biotechnological power.
Kass obviously has strong intuitions that 60-year-old men should keep out of certain activities, but whether it is the ice that disagrees with them or with Kass, or the idea of their earning money, or whether it is something about the game of hockey that is particularly unsuitable beyond the sixtieth birthday, we are not told. This is not the place for a discussion of postmenopausal mums, but one wonders how older women and men have offended Kass.11
Kass’s deliberate linkage of cloning to enhancement may seem surprising, but he does so because he sees both as exercises in hubris, a presumptuous attempt to master nature and mold it to our liking. Kass’s thoughts on cloning perhaps involve the idea that human clones will have psychological difficulties because people will have special expectations of them and possibly he imagines the same will be true of the expectations parents will have of their enhanced children. Just as the clone’s life will always be compared with that of his or her genetic parent, the enhanced child will be compared with an imaginary ideal. It has been suggested that the clone risks having a “life in the shadow” of the person from whose genes he or she was cloned.12 The idea is perhaps that a clone would have the feeling that his life had already been lived and, consequently, he will be deprived of “an open future.” We know how his genetic parent lived, so we will know how the child will live. He will be considered as “the copy” that is of lower quality than its original and that has no life of his own. Elsewhere, Kass expressed it this way:
The cloned individual, moreover, will be saddled with a genotype that has already lived.… People are likely always to compare his performances in life with that of his alter ego. Still, one must also expect parental and other efforts to shape this new life after the original—or at least to view the child with the original version always firmly in mind. Why else did they clone from the star basketball player, mathematician, and beauty queen—or even dear old dad—in the first place?13
Since there is no empirical data on human reproductive cloning, we have no idea from whom people would wish to clone, although it seems more likely that people will choose to clone themselves or loved ones than strangers or beauty queens. The most rational choice for a genome to clone would be that of a particularly healthy and long-lived individual. In such a case there seem to be strong arguments, both moral and prudential, to (if the technique were safe enough) avoid the risk of the genetic roulette that is sexual reproduction and opt for a tried and tested genome of proven virtue. Kass’s argument assumes, without any evidence or plausible argument, the malevolence and stupidity of parents who want to make use of the cloning technique to have a child.
The second problem in appealing to the idea that a cloned child will not have an open future is saying that a clone will not be unique and will not develop a personal identity. We know that the clone (unless it is a monozygotic twin) will have a different uterine environment, will probably be born to a different woman at a different time and place to its genotype donor, will have a different education, and many other things. Since we also know that all these experiences actually affect the physical structure of the brain, there is no significant sense in which any clone could be determined to be like its genome donor.
The third problem with the argument is that all the concerns expressed in it are based on the assumption that people, despite all the explanations and information that exist to the contrary, will persist in their belief in genetic determinism, that whether the genome has been cloned or enhanced the resulting individual will have its freedom and capacity for self-development dictated by the genome it has been given. But we have all been created with a fixed genome without an obvious loss of freedom. Finally, such expectations are also true of all parenting. What parent does not look at their child with themselves in mind as a model of expectation, if only a model of minimal expectation? “I want my child to be better than me!” Even in a context of radical parental expectation it is unlikely that burdens on children will be so great as to render unacceptable the whole practice.14
Kass further believes there is a “special kind of restriction on freedom—let’s call it the problem of conformity or homogenization [which] is in fact quite serious.” Kass thinks the effect will involve “raising the floor but greatly lowering the ceiling of human possibility, and reducing the possibility of genuine freedom, individuality, and greatness.”
These issues are addressed elsewhere in this book (in chapter 4), not least in the same context as Kass also readdresses them in relation to life extension. For the moment it is perhaps enough to observe that, just as eliminating a disease, say smallpox, contributes to conformity in the sense that people do not differ with respect to suffering or not suffering from smallpox, so also the conferral of new powers, of memory, concentration, strength, endurance, or intelligence will lead to a greater uniformity if not conformity (with its overtones of obedience) in the sense that people will possibly, albeit over a very long term, differ less drastically in respects amenable to enhancement. That is of course only if all are enhanced. If some are not then the differences will be greater between enhanced and nonenhanced individuals. This Kass should celebrate, but of course such exacerbation of difference also has its problems. However, Kass cannot have it both ways.
It is possible but not, I think, likely that people will differ less drastically in respects amenable to enhancement. It depends how the enhancements will work but, if they simply augment existing powers and capacities, then, since these differ from person to person, it is likely that the enhanced powers will also differ in this way and possibly exacerbate the differences.
Certainly enhancements will raise the floor, but surely also they will raise the ceiling of possibility for humankind. It may be that healthy people differ from one another less than all healthy people do from the sick, or that, as Tolstoy reminds us in the first lines of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.”15 But these “facts” are hardly arguments for the preservation of disease or misery, although Kass is tempted by suspicion of happiness, as we shall see. It is worth recalling here our discussion of the evolution of education and literacy. People for sure have become almost uniformly literate in large parts of the world, but there is surely no evidence that this has led to any increase in conformity “reducing the possibility of genuine freedom, individuality, and greatness”—quite the contrary, surely?
After his preambolic rehearsal of three of the less persuasive arguments against enhancement, Kass poses and attempts to answer the main question:
Why, if at all, are we bothered by the voluntary self-administration of agents that would change our bodies or alter our minds? What is disquieting about our attempts to improve upon human nature, or even our own particular instance of it?16
Kass starts his answer cautiously:
It is difficult to put this disquiet into words. We are in an area where initial repugnances are hard to translate into sound moral arguments. We are probably repelled by the idea of drugs that erase memories, or that change personalities; or of interventions that enable 70-year-olds to bear children or play professional sports.… But is there wisdom in this repugnance?
I feel Kass feels I ought to be ashamed to admit I am not repelled by any of these possibilities (though I would not necessarily choose them for myself). Kass has resumed his irrational flirtation with repugnance as a morally relevant feature; it is instructive to remind ourselves of its provenance and poverty.
In a now notorious discussion entitled “the wisdom of repugnance”17 Kass tries to make plausible the thesis that thoughtlessness is a virtue. Below I draw on criticisms of this style of approach that I have elaborated elsewhere.18 Kass begins again by inviting us to share his prejudices:
We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings not because of the strangeness or novelty of the undertaking, but because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear.19
Again I find myself failing to share Kass’s relish for repugnance. Clones are surely as wonderful as any other humans and I am proud to say I am personally acquainted with quite a few clones. Moreover, human clones have existed as long as human reproduction has been practiced. Eve was in a sense “cloned” from Adam since the original meaning of the term derives from the Greek Klon, “twig” or “offshoot,” and Adam’s rib (so reliable20 sources claim) played that role in the creation of Eve.21 Monozygotic (identical) twins have also been around as long as sexual reproduction; they are clones and their occurrence is very frequent. Three per thousand births are clones in this (true) sense, sharing as they do their entire genome, unlike clones produced by cell nuclear transfer (the “Dolly method”).22 Cloning is therefore a familiar and largely successful reproductive practice, which occasions no repugnance in me and little in most others (with the possible exception of Kass himself).
The difficulty is, of course, to know when one’s sense of outrage is evidence of something morally disturbing and when it is simply an expression of bare prejudice or something even more shameful. George Orwell23 once memorably referred to this reliance on intuition as use of “moral nose”; as if one could simply sniff a situation and detect wickedness. The problem is that nasal reasoning is notoriously unreliable, and olfactory moral philosophy, despite valiant efforts by Kass and others, has done little to refine it or give it a respectable foundation. We should remember that in the recent past, among the many discreditable uses of so-called “moral feelings,” people have been disgusted by the sight of Jews, black people, and, indeed, women being treated as equals and mixing on terms of equality with others. In the absence of convincing arguments, we should be suspicious of accepting the conclusions of those who use nasal reasoning as the basis of their moral convictions.
In Kass’s suggestion (he disarmingly admits revulsion “is not an argument”), the giveaway is in his use of the term “rightfully.” How can we know that revulsion, however sincerely or vividly felt, is occasioned by the violation of things we rightfully hold dear unless we have a theory, or at least an argument, about which of the things we happen to hold dear we rightfully hold dear? The term “rightfully” implies a judgment which confirms the respectability of the feelings. If it is simply one feeling confirming another, then we really are in the situation Wittgenstein lampooned as buying a second copy of the same newspaper to confirm the truth of what we read in the first.
In addition to the wisdom of repugnance, Kass has three main arguments to make. I shall follow the headings Kass himself uses for these arguments.
In his discussion of mastery Kass follows Michael Sandel’s arguments, which we have already examined in depth. Kass notes problems with them which have also been highlighted in this book. Noting Sandel’s plea that we accept the gifted nature of existence, Kass rightly comments:
Modesty born of gratitude for the world’s “givenness” may enable us to recognize that not everything in the world is open to any use we may desire or devise, but it will not by itself teach us which things can be fiddled with and which should be left inviolate.24
To perform this trick Kass makes some distinctions:
The word “given” has two relevant meanings, the second of which Sandel’s account omits: “given” meaning “bestowed as a gift” and “given” …something “granted” definitely fixed and specified. Most of the given bestowals of nature have their given species-specified natures: they are each and all of a given sort. …To turn a man into a cock-roach … would be dehumanizing. To try to turn a man into more than a man might be so as well.25
Well so it might, but there is a big difference between the field of force of a word like “dehumanizing” and that of “wonderwoman” or “superman.” The issue, just as Kass rightly points out when discussing Sandel’s account of the given, is not whether it is given, nor even whether it is “species-specified” or “natural,” but whether it is good to turn a man into a nonhuman person.
Kass accordingly makes the point that
[o]nly if there is something precious in the given—beyond the mere fact of its giftedness—does what is given serve as a source of restraint against efforts that would degrade it.
There follows a long and wistful list of “only if’s”:
Only if there is something inherently good or dignified about, say, natural procreation; … only then can we begin to see why those aspects of our nature need to be defended.
Unfortunately all these “only if’s” involve an equally long list of non sequiturs when we come to the “only then’s”. Those who have tried it often report that there is not much dignity involved in natural procreation, either at the stage of conception or indeed at birth26. In the case of conception, the lack of dignity is often cited as part of the fun: “if God did not have a sense of humor, he/she wouldn’t have invented sex.” Be that as it may, it does not follow from the fact that there is something good or dignified about a natural process that it needs to be defended for the simple and sufficient reason that there may be something better about its synthetic modification of replacement. It is whether or not that is the case which would need to be established before the inherent goodness of something could function as a reason for defending it.
When we turn to the nature of the means, Kass identifies the question as
how do, and how should, the excellent ones become excellent?
He is concerned with a whole range of what he regards as dehumanizing means of achieving human enhancement, methods which deform the “deep structure of natural human activity.”27 For example, when he says “‘personal achievements’ impersonally achieved are not truly the achievements of persons. That I can use a calculator to do my arithmetic does not make me a knower of arithmetic,” he is surely right, but we do not condemn calculators nor indeed their users on that account; rather, we use them without particular pride, although knowing when to use a calculator is something one can be proud of and knowing when to choose enhancement for oneself or others and which enhancements to choose may be achievements of considerable significance.
Kass believes that the fact that we are not responsible for the effects of chemical or electronic enhancers, and hence cannot take proper pride in the achievements they facilitate, somehow makes their use inappropriate or inauthentic.
This may be true of some types of enhancement, but for all of them we may surely take pride in our choice of appropriate means to our ends and congratulate ourselves on our wise choices and on the fact that we have made the choice that benefits us in ways that we value. Some chemical, mechanical, or electronic enhancers will leave plenty of room for effort, skill training, hard work, suffering, and all the other good things particularly favored by puritans. If I take a pill which improves my memory or powers of concentration, I will still have to study, and use that study to draw conclusions, formulate ideas, or write books for which I may take appropriate credit or blame: credit for the work and ideas but not the powers of concentration or memory that helped me to those achievements. Equally, if I take another pill which improves my stamina and endurance, or my muscles are enhanced by drugs, I will still have to train and I will probably also still need some natural (whatever that may be) talent for the sport or athletic event in which I wish to participate. There is always some personal contribution, perhaps unhappily for those true consequentialists who just value the consequences, however achieved, or those men and women who just value their superiority, however effortless.28
Kass ends this section with many words betraying the promise of one:
In a word, one major trouble with biotechnical (especially mental) “improvers” is that they produce changes in us by disrupting the normal character of human being-at-work-in-the-world…which when fine and full constitutes human flourishing.
One feels inclined here to say “well, whatever turns you on Leon,” but there does not seem to be a compelling value engaged here. Au contraire, many favor “human being-at-rest-in-the-world” or human being-having-a-good-time-in-the-world.” Kass concludes this section with the observation that “[t]o the extent that we come to regard our transformed nature as normal, we shall have forgotten what we lost.” Perhaps, but consider a phenomenon of two centuries ago: “human being-traveling-to-New York-from-London-in-the-world-and-taking-three-months-to-get-there” or “human being-without-anesthesia-and-suffering-the-pains-of-natural-childbirth.” True, we have forgotten what we lost; the issue is, as so often, one of rational regret. Do we have any reasons to regret this loss when we compare the loss with our present situation? Remember those who wish to can still spend months at sea without vitamin C and with scurvy a constant companion; and those who wish to can have fully natural childbirth, however painful or risky. What is different is that it chances that these things are now matters of choice.29 Indeed, the fact that they are matters of choice, and yet still people sometimes choose the hard way, is further evidence that Kass’s Luddite approach to enhancement is misplaced, even for someone with his priorities. People still choose to sail round the world, or trek across the Arctic with dog sleighs, and some benighted souls even refuse anesthesia. Technology, including enhancement technology, surely gives us the best of both worlds, the Luddite and the real.
The endgame is, not untypically, dubious. In this, the final section of Kass’s essay, he concentrates on longevity and his arguments against it. Since I have considered these in chapter 4, I will not discuss them here. Kass next considers “pharmacologically assisted happy souls.”30 He notes that “[e]rsatz … feelings of self-esteem are not the real McCoy.” Forgive a philosophical quibble, but this remark is analytic: it is necessarily true and tells us nothing. Of course “false” feelings are not real feelings! Kass elaborates:
No music lover would be satisfied with getting from a pill the pleasure of listening to Mozart without ever hearing the music. Most people want both to feel good and to feel good about themselves, but only as a result of being good and doing good.31
Again Kass is right, but not because he or the music lover to whom he appeals are fastidious. You cannot get music from a pill because a pill does not make a sound, even in the brain. In a related way, you cannot have a pill to make you feel “grief” because grief is not a bodily sensation. Grief is the name we give to the feelings (of whatever sort) occasioned by loss through death. No death32, no grief; that again is analytic, true by definition. It is not a failure of technology that there is not and could never be a pill for grief. It is a logical not a technological problem. Despite this error, Kass is still right: we don’t want a pill to make us feel that our lover loves us—we want to be loved. Equally, we don’t want a pill to make us feel rich—we want to be rich. So we won’t use pills for love or money. But if we are not rational we might try, and serve us right! But what’s that to the purpose? It is not wrong, nor unethical, merely (merely!) futile.
There is a sense of course in which we do have a technological source of Mozart on tap. It is recorded music, from phonograph to iPod. But the use of these has not supplanted live music: concerts, whether rocky-horrific or chamber Mozartian, are still alive and well. An additional fallacy of Kass’s approach is that he assumes, contrary to the evidence, that new technologies always supplant old methods or natural processes. Usually they coexist; people are happy to use their iPods on a daily basis but they still go to concerts and many still play instruments. My eighteen-year-old son loves his iPod, he plays the flute and goes to concerts, and many others do equivalent things.
We might, however, want a pill to make us concentrate, stay awake, or improve memory, but since we cannot remember what we haven’t experienced it will be no substitute for learning, whether by rote or by experience. Just as the straw men Kass has invented are not real men with real arguments, so his ersatz experiences are not real experiences: not experiences at all because not experienced, merely felt.
This was all discussed long ago by Jonathan Glover,33 who imagined an experience machine that might make us believe we owned, say, expensive beachfront property in California and were experiencing the attentions of many beautiful lovers of infinite attractiveness and skill. Why would we not “live” on the experience machine forever? Why would it not be chosen by rational self-interested people. In fact, Glover and I would both, with Kass, reject that machine for the reasons set out so eloquently by Glover and Kass. But this is also because those reasons mean that the machine would constitute no sort of enhancement of life or of people. Is it unethical? Should we prevent others from accessing it if they could pay for their infinite experience? A different question!
Kass’s final flourish is full of sound and fury but it signifies only a puritan mean-spiritedness and lack of imagination:
A flourishing human life is not a life lived with an ageless body or untroubled soul, but rather a life lived in rhythmed time, mindful of time’s limits, appreciative of each season and filled first of all with those intimate human relations that are ours only because we are born, age, replace ourselves, decline and die—and know it. It is a life of aspiration, made possible by and born of experienced lack, of the disproportion between the transcendent longings of the soul and the limited capacities of our bodies and minds. It is a life that stretches towards some fulfilment to which our natural human soul has been oriented, and, unless we extirpate the source, will always be oriented. It is a life not of better genes and enhancing chemicals but of love and friendship, song and dance, speech and deed, working and learning, revering and worshipping. The pursuit of an ageless body and a satisfied soul is finally a distraction and a deformation.
It is just magic dragonalia to think that all the good things in this list are only possible because of limited time, limited imagination, and death. As Tom Stoppard said in another context: “necrophiliac rubbish!”34 The deformation is not wishing for and trying to achieve something different and better, but in trying to prevent those with a different vision from even attempting to live without dissatisfaction and death. I wish for the possibility of removing limits from our bodies and minds. I believe this may become fully possible without abandoning a life of indefinite extent full “of love and friendship, song and dance, speech and deed, working and learning” and of course much fuller of these wonderful things than Kass’s stunted lives could ever be. I personally am not much attracted to “revering and worshipping”; to me these dispositions are entirely devoid of dignity, human or personal, but Kass may indulge in them, and welcome. What is thoroughly unacceptable to any free spirit is to accept Kass’s puritan, narrow, limited, and undignified, let alone weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable, conception of the scope and limits of life and its possibilities. May his soul have its life’s desire and forever remain unsatisfied. He is truly welcome. But is it not a little tyrannical to purport to stand in the way of the very different aspirations of others?
Kass’s final flourish sets out a self-defeating and defeatist agenda. He aspires to finitude, to preset and arbitrary limits to human aspirations as well as to human powers:
Finitude recognized spurs aspiration. Fine aspiration acted upon is itself the core of happiness. Not the agelessness of the body, nor the contentment of the soul, nor even the list of external achievement and accomplishments of life, but the engaged and energetic being-at-work of what nature uniquely gave us is what we need to treasure and defend.35
I do not recognize finitude, only the limitless possibilities of the human spirit and of human ingenuity. If Kass wishes to remain a limited human being, that is of course a matter for him. The sinister message is in the tail of Kass’s agenda; he wishes to “treasure and defend.” Treasuring is fine—Kass himself is something of an international treasure—but when he seeks to defend limitations he trespasses on the freedom of others and seeks to shackle the human spirit within the confines of the limits of his own desires and imagination. This is something those who defend freedom will wish to oppose.
In 2003 Jürgen Habermas published a book entitled The Future of Human Nature, making available in English translation ideas of his which were first presented in 2000 and 2001. This book, setting out his opposition to the human determination of human nature, is excruciatingly complex and crushingly conservative.36 The stature of Habermas as one of the most famous and influential German philosophers of the last century makes it an important work to understand. The book discusses many issues of contemporary relevance from human cloning to sex selection, stem cell research, and preimplantation diagnosis. Two sets of arguments are particularly relevant to human enhancement and it is these on which we will concentrate now.
We will start with Habermas’s ideas concerning the evils of actions which might control or preempt the decisions of future generations.
Habermas takes over ideas he attributes to Hans Jonas. In a resonant passage, Jonas sets out his stall against the legitimacy of decisions which might determine the nature of future generations:37
But whose power is this—and over whom or over what? Obviously the power of those living today over those coming after them, who will be the defenseless objects of prior choices made by the planners of today. The other side of the power of today is the future bondage of the living to the dead.38
Habermas himself repeats and endorses this idea of the illegitimacy of eugenic control many times in the course of the book. He seems to have two main objections. One is in essence that voiced by Jonas, that of human bondage. The second stipulates, but produces only the most obscurantist of arguments for, the idea that such determination is inegalitarian and destroys in members of subsequent generations “an equal right to an autonomous conduct of life.”39
How does Habermas develop these ideas?
With genetic enhancement, there is no communicative scope for the projected child to be addressed as a second person and to be involved in a communication process. From the adolescent’s perspective, an instrumental determination cannot, like a pathogenic socialization process, be revised by “critical re-appraisal.” It does not permit the adolescent looking back on the prenatal intervention to engage in a revisionary learning process.40
Eugenic interventions aiming at enhancement reduce ethical freedom insofar as they tie down the person concerned to rejected, but irreversible intentions of third parties, barring him from the spontaneous self-perception of being the undivided author of his own life.41
We noted in chapter 5 that if consent were required before we could do things for or to children, few children would survive long enough to grow to adulthood and the consequent cruelty to children would reach unprecedented proportions.
It is surely obvious that we cannot avoid making decisions when failure to do so may adversely affect others, not only children but also for future generations. To decide not to intervene to enhance where we can do so is to condemn future generations to life without the advantages we might have bestowed. They can no more consent to this deprivation than they can consent to the interventions to which Habermas objects:
[T]here is no communicative scope for the projected child to be addressed as a second person and to be involved in a communication process. From the adolescent’s perspective, an instrumental determination cannot, like a pathogenic socialization process, be revised by “critical re-appraisal.” It does not permit the adolescent looking back on the prenatal intervention to engage in a revisionary learning process.
Of course not, but the same is true for the instrumental determination involved in decisions not to protect or advantage children. A child cannot do any of this long-winded jargonized thinking with a “third party” decision to intervene, nor can he or she do so with decisions not to intervene. Consider the decision to vaccinate shortly after birth or a decision not to take folic acid before conception: the “future bondage of the living to the dead” is a permanent feature of generational life. We have noted elsewhere in this book the ways in which the sights and sounds to which our parents expose us irrevocably create the connections in our brains and hence the functioning of our minds. It has not been threatened by the possibility of human enhancement any more than the myriad of other prior decisions that have determined the nature of the world we have inherited and the bodies and minds we possess.
Habermas’s suggestion is that because future (enhanced) generations “may no longer see themselves as the undivided authors of their life,” they may also find themselves with interpersonal relationships that are “no longer consistent with the egalitarian premises of morality and law.”42 Why this should be is, if possible, even more obscure, but Habermas seems to rely on the following as support for this idea:
In the context of democratically constituted pluralistic society where every citizen has an equal right to an autonomous conduct of life, practices of enhancing eugenics cannot be “normalized” in a legitimate way, because the selection of desirable dispositions cannot be a priori dissociated from the judgment of specific life projects.43
I think Habermas is saying that because future enhanced individuals will not have chosen their enhanced nature they cannot conduct their lives autonomously. We have seen, however, that we are all in the position of having had “the way we are” determined by a combination of the acts and omissions of our parents and others with whom we have interacted since conception. If this is inimical to equality or autonomy, then neither equality not autonomy exist nor have they ever existed.
There is a story told of the former British prime minister James Callaghan. When he was chancellor of the exchequer he thought he should brush up his skills in economics. He apparently received private tuition at Nuffield College, Oxford. A student who shared the same economics tutor as the future prime minister asked his tutor what Callaghan was like as a student. The answer was: “James Callaghan is a very hard man to bamboozle, but once bamboozled, a very hard man to unbamboozle!”44 The best explanation I can find for Habermas’s views on “critical reappraisal” and “revisionary learning” is that he has managed to convince himself that these ideas have meaning and relevance in the context of enhancement and has, like Callaghan, proved very hard to unbamboozle.
Habermas has another go at these issues in his “Postscript 2002.”45 He suggests that if we want to understand the harms of enhancement correctly we need to consider them in the light of a model of a particular moral community:
According to this model, eugenic practices, while they are not directly intervening into the genetically modified person’s spheres of free action, might well harm the status of the future person as a member of the universe of moral beings.… In the moral universe, subjection of a person to the unjustly imposed arbitrary will of another one is ruled out.
Habermas then contrasts this with:
An external or alien determination of the natural and mental constitution of a future person, prior to an entry into the moral community.
Habermas seems to regard this both as a serious possibility and as being perhaps even worse than slavery. Although when he implies that either “might well” harm the status of the future person, he is saying something pathetically weak. It might well not! There is no way that any of the methods of enhancement considered in this book or known to science could have the effect of determining “the natural and mental constitution of a future person” if this implies some loss or autonomy. This is scaremongering of an order that could surely only be the product of a bamboozled mind. If bamboozling of this depth and comprehensiveness might be the product of enhancement, then indeed there would be good reasons for apprehension for the future of humankind!
Consider the example of such an alien intervention with rather different consequences that we discussed in chapter 2. We considered David Baltimore’s work to develop genetic interventions to prevent cancer and heart disease in future generations. If these were developed, then even if (per impossibile as I think) it might harm the status of a future person as a member of the universe of moral beings, it would be a great advantage to her as a member of the universe of healthy beings.
But is there any reason to suppose, as Habermas hypothesizes, that genetic enhancements threaten membership of the universe of moral beings? It seems to come down to how Habermas imagines that the future people will feel about knowing they have benefited from enhancements. Habermas sees only gloom and doom:
Insofar as the genetically altered person feels that the scope for a possible use of her ethical freedom has been intentionally changed by a prenatal design she may suffer from the consciousness of sharing authorship of her own life and her own destiny with someone else.46
The “insofar as” may be no distance at all and the “may” maybe not. One feels that this possible person should pull herself together and be glad that her parents cared enough about her to choose to give her advantages and protections, the lack of which might have harmed her more! Since we cannot by hypothesis know either way, we cannot be sure. We are necessarily judging now sub specie aeterni47 and her parents, trying to do their best, have a judgment to make. That judgment and the responsibilities that go with it cannot be avoided by the ostrich-ethics recommended by Habermas.
But it gets worse. Habermas has a final doom-laden flourish, but this time the doom is sure and certain, not possible or maybe:
Not even the highly general good of bodily health maintains one and the same value within the contexts of different life histories. Parents can’t even know whether a mild physical handicap may not prove in the end to be an advantage for their child.48
Of course they can’t! And they equally cannot know whether a severe handicap might have this effect. So what are we to conclude: that we should consider handicapping our kids just in case? Or what is the same thing,49 consider, and actually decide, not to remove possible handicaps just in case?
Parents cannot evade or avoid responsibility for how their children will turn out, at least insofar as they have the power to leave things as they are or make them different. The power to make things different means that parents have a choice to do or forebear with highly probable but different consequences attending either future possibility following their decision. They have to do their best. What they should not do is their worst for their kids, and leaving their kids with a handicap of unknown and highly speculative advantage but known disadvantage would be, to put it mildly, problematic in almost anyone’s philosophy.