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Jürgen Habermas’
Critique of Liberal Eugenics
Daniel C. Henrich
International Centre for Ethics in the
Sciences and Humanities
Tübingen University, Germany
ABSTRACT. This essay examines whether Habermas’ approach to bioethics implies
that the ethical challenges of eugenics cannot be answered within the scope of a
deontological account, but only with reference to a concept of the good life or a
normative anthropology. First, Habermas’ ‘argument against alien determination’ is
elaborated, based on an action-theoretical concept of ‘human nature’ which is ana-
lyzed in the part three. Habermas’ main objection against genetic engineering, namely
that it entails a reification of human nature by undermining the consciousness of
autonomy of the genetically manipulated person, is also discussed. Subsequently, his
concept of human nature as a condition of possibility of our ethical self-understand-
ing, which is expressed in the phrase ‘ethics of the species’, is introduced. It is argued
that this term clearly indicates Habermas’ departure from the path of deontological
ethics. Moreover, this essay asserts that two readings of the argument against alien
determination are possible (a weak and a quasi-transcendental one) and that the
expression ‘consciousness of autonomy’ therefore remains ambiguous. The fourth
part of the paper deals with the question whether or not the argument against alien
determination is conditional on the assumption of genetic determinism.
In part five, the author claims that in contrast to earlier conceptions, Habermas
now implicitly raises the question ‘Why be moral?’ and at the same time refuses
to address it. The essay concludes with two different anthropological accounts
that can be found in Habermas’ work and that might be helpful to correct the
anthropological deficiency of his bioethical account.
I. INTRODUCTION
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and thus their ability to act as moral agents. Habermas calls this “the
argument against alien determination” (2003, 86).3
Consequently, for Habermas genetic modification on the whole entails
the risk of a transformation of the ethical self-understanding of the species
‘humankind’. He therefore proposes a “moralizing of human nature” (2003,
25), which can be understood as a commitment to the current ethical self-
understanding of humankind. Since Habermas contends that “an assess-
ment of morality as a whole is itself not a moral judgment” (2003, 73), he
deems it impossible to give any moral arguments for this commitment.
With this argumentation, Habermas himself raises the old and non-deonto-
logical question: ‘Why be moral?’ But – as I will argue – refuses to answer it.
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But even if Habermas assumes that the grammatical form of our language
game could be altered by genetic interventions, it is striking that he does
not address this problem in detail.
The hypothesis of the author of the present essay is that the expres-
sion ‘consciousness of autonomy’ (and, accordingly, the argument against
alien determination itself) remains ambiguous. On the one hand, Haber-
mas suspects that “eugenic manipulation changes the rules of the lan-
guage game itself” (2003, 92) and therefore implies that the argument
against alien determination refers to a quasi-transcendental form of
autonomy, which is part of every (moral) language game (Habermas
2007). On the other, it seems that the term refers to moral agents’ psycho-
logical condition (one example will be discussed below).
Hence, a strong and a weak reading of the argument against alien determina-
tion is distinguished. The weak reading understands the term ‘consciousness
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The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its
normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the
faculty of action is ontologically rooted (1998, 247).
The change would take place in the mind. […] When the adolescent
learns about the design drawn up by another person for intervening in
her genetic features in order to modify certain traits, the perspective
of being a grown body may be superseded – in her objectivating self-
perception – by the perspective of being something made (2003, 53).
At the same time, this argument seems to indicate that only the weak
reading of the argument against alien determination (and thus of the term
autonomy) can be right: if the change did indeed only take place in the
mind, genetic engineering does not necessarily cause a loss of consciousness
for responsible agency, since the consequences of this knowledge might
differ from person to person.
In this respect, it is also important for the genetically altered indi-
vidual to know that genetic engineering is not (and will never be) able to
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determine his or her actions and aspirations in general. Thus, John Dupré
calls the idea that human beings’ concrete intentions and life plans could
be programmed a ‘genocentric fallacy’, especially since the opinion that
genes are responsible for specific traits is scientifically incorrect.
It is still very common to hear references to ‘genes for’ this or that –
eye color, intelligence, height, homosexuality, and so on. But it is vital
to remember that though the production of particular proteins is nec-
essary for the appearance of many traits, it is almost never close to
sufficient (Dupré 2003, 84).
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from the moral status of the embryo. Instead, he focuses on the conse-
quences of the intervention for our ethical self-understanding. His main
hypothesis is that genetic manipulation embodies a particular form of
determination that undermines constitutive conditions of human moral-
ity. The individual who has to accept his or her own ‘nature’ as the
expression of another’s will may lose a mental precondition for being a
morally responsible agent.
This argumentation embeds our moral ability in a natural context,
which functions as the condition of possibility of moral action. It is
expressed by the term ‘ethics of the species’: with respect to its natural
genesis, human morality as a whole can be understood as an ‘ethics of
the species’ and is therefore also subject to the general possibility of
transformation. The term thus implies a break with a central aspect of
deontological ethics in whose tradition Habermas’ discourse ethics can be
found: the apriority of moral philosophy. Although Kant did not disre-
gard the significance of ‘human nature’, he rigorously denied the possibil-
ity of any grounding of moral philosophy and ethical validity in anthro-
pological claims (Edwards 2000; Schmidt 2005; Sullivan 1995; Wilson
2007; Wood 1991).
In his earlier writings, Habermas shared this view. He maintained a
sharp distinction between the terms ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’. He understood
‘ethical’ in the sense of ‘ethos’, which approximates to ‘custom’ or ‘con-
vention’.9 For Habermas, ethical discourses are “embedded in the life-his-
torical context” (2001, 12) and are not supposed to be universal. They deal
with questions of lifestyle and identity and are relative to specific cultural
backgrounds. By contrast, “moral practical discourses […] require a break
with all of the unquestioned truth of an established, concrete ethical life,
in addition to distancing oneself from the contexts of life with which
one’s identity is inextricably interwoven” (2001, 13). Based on this point
of view, ethical and moral standards differ with regard to the scope of their
validity claims. Ethical norms offer cultural rules of behaviour that are
bound to a specific context, whereas moral rules claim to be independent
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VII. CONCLUSION
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WORKS CITED
Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Buchanan, Allen. 2000. From Chance to Choice. Genetics and Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Dupré, John. 2003. Darwin’s Legacy. What Evolution Means Today. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Edwards, Jeffrey. 2000. “Self-Love, Anthropology and Universal Benevolence in Kant’s
Metaphysics of Morals.” The Review of Metaphysics 53:887-914.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1973. “Philosophische Anthropologie (ein Lexikonartikel).” In Kultur
und Kritik. Verstreute Aufsätze, 89-111. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1991.“Treffen Hegels Einwände auch auf die Diskursethik zu?”
In Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik, 9-30. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
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Habermas, Jürgen. 1995. “Morality and Ethical Life: Does Hegel’s Critique of Kant
Apply to Discourse Ethics?” In Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 195-
215. Cambridge, Polity.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. “Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert
Mead’s Theory of Subjectivity.” In Postmetaphysical Thinking, 149-204. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. Justification and Application. Remarks on Discourse Ethics. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2003. The Future of Human Nature. Oxford: Blackwell.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2006. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Polity.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2007. “The Language Game of Responsible Agency and the Problem
of Free Will: How can Epistemic Dualism be Reconciled with Ontological
Monism?” Philosophical Explorations 1:13-50.
Handyside, Alan. 1990. “Pregnancies from Biopsied Human Preimplantation Embryos
Sexed by Y-Specific DNA Amplification.” Nature 344:689-796.
Handyside, Alan. 2010. “Let Parents Decide.” Nature 464:978-979.
Henrich, Daniel C. 2007. Zwischen Bewusstseinsphilosophie und Naturalismus. Zu den metaphy-
sischen Implikationen der Diskursethik von Jürgen Habermas. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Honneth, Axel. 1991.“Habermas’ Anthropology of Knowledge: The Theory of Knowl-
edge-Constitutive Interests.” In The Critique of Power, 203-239. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical
Fragments. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Prusak, Bernard G. 2005. “Rethinking ‘Liberal Eugenics’.” Hastings Center Report 6:31-42.
Schmidt, Claudia M. 2005. “The Anthropological Dimension of Kant’s Metaphysik of
Morals.” Kant-Studien 1:65-84.
Sullivan, Roger J. 1995. “The Influence of Kant’s Anthropology on His Moral Theory.”
The Review of Metaphysics 1:77-94.
Wilson, Holly L. 2007. “Kant’s Integration of Morality and Anthropology.” Kant-Studien
1:87-104.
Wood, Allen W. 1991. “Unsociable Sociability: The Anthropological Basis of Kantian
Ethics.” Philosophical Topics 1:325-351.
NOTES
1. Alan Handyside reported on the first successful applications of PGD in 1990 (Handyside
1990).
2. Buchanan et al. refer to this kind of account as “The personal service model” (Buchanan
et al. 2000, 12ff.).
3. Habermas also uses the phrase “alien co-authorship” (2003, 85).
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4. For the meaning of anthropology in Habermas’ early work, cf. Honneth 1991.
5. Cf. Prusak 2005, 32ff.
6. Horkheimer, Adorno 2002.
7. For Habermas, these presuppositions have an exclusive epistemic status. In contrast, Karl-
Otto Apel claims that they also have an existential content, which obliges each participant to adhere
to them.
8. The correctness of Habermas’ interpretation of Arendt’s account of natality will not be
discussed here.
9. The term ‘moral’ usually refers to the level of concrete normative orders of human action,
whereas ‘ethical’ refers to a theoretical level, the analysis of this concrete (moral) normativity.
Ethics thus usually refers to a ‘theory of morals’. According to this conventional understanding,
the terms ‘ethics’ and ‘moral philosophy’ can be used synonymously.
10. Cf. Habermas 1995, 197.
11. For further analysis of the relationship between anthropology and pragmatism in Haber-
mas’ early writings, cf. Honneth 1991.
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