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Jurgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature , translated by Hella Beister,

Max Pensky, and William Rehg:The Future of Human Nature

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Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature , translated by Hella Beister, Max Pensky, and
William Rehg
The Future of Human Nature by Jürgen Habermas,
Review by: Reviewed by Joel Anderson
Ethics, Vol. 115, No. 4 (July 2005), pp. 816-821
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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816 Ethics July 2005

to pay close attention to the historical evolution of the idea of rights to advance
our understanding of long-standing issues in the philosophy of rights. Yet we
must remain guarded in thinking that attention to evolution of the discourse
can offer us all the resources we need to settle once and for all the multitude
of conceptual issues raised by the idea of rights. My own view is that attention
to history gives us resources for arguing for a particular conception of rights or
for making a case for taking a particular stance on an issue. But for those who
are less guarded about this way of proceeding, this book is certainly a good
model for how to draw productively on the historical evolution of the idea of
rights to reveal avenues for tackling the issues to which the idea of rights gives
rise.

Derrick Darby
Texas A&M University

Habermas, Jürgen. The Future of Human Nature. Translated by Hella Beister, Max
Pensky, and William Rehg.
Cambridge: Polity, 2003. Pp. viii⫹127. $45.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).

This book is of particular interest for two sorts of reasons. For those interested
in bioethics, it contains a genuinely new set of arguments for placing serious
restrictions on using prenatal genetic technologies to “enhance” offspring. And
for those interested in Habermas’s moral philosophy, it contains a number of
new developments in his “discourse ethics”—not the least of which is a willing-
ness to engage in applied ethics at all.
The book comprises three essays: a broadly metaethical essay on the re-
lationship between “morality” (as a matter of universalistic deontology) and
“ethics” (as a matter of communities’ or individuals’ critical self-clarification
of their values); the core essay on issues of genetic manipulation and selection
(“The Debate on the Ethical Self-Understanding of the Species,” together with
a “Postscript” discussing objections from Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Tho-
mas McCarthy, and Ludwig Siep); and an important lecture on “Faith and
Knowledge,” delivered a few weeks after September 11, 2001, which proposes
a dialogical and respectful model of the relationship between believers and
unbelievers within secularizing modernity. I shall focus here on the discussion
of bioethics developed in the first two essays.
Part of what makes Habermas’s position interesting is that his reasons for
viewing genetic manipulation and screening as impermissible (except to pre-
vent disease and serious impairment) have nothing to do with claims about
religion, prepersonal life, or the “natural.” Some of the reasons for his concern
will be familiar, such as the expansion of inequalities and the risks of unpre-
dictable harms from implementing new technology without adequate testing.
But his central, genuinely original argument is that the decision to shape a
future person’s identity through prenatal genetic intervention threatens the
freedom and equality to which all persons are entitled as a birthright. More
specifically, Habermas’s thesis is that although some forms of genetic manip-
ulation and screening are morally permissible (those that prevent debilitating

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 Book Reviews 817

diseases), enhancement-oriented practices entail an asymmetrical relationship

of influence between generations that threatens those future persons in their
status as free and equal moral agents; that this asymmetrical influence is a
new development; and that its problematic character is best understood not
in terms of a violation of norms of interpersonal morality but rather in terms
of an “ethical” orientation of humans as humans toward who they are and
want to be.
Habermas’s starting normative assumption is that the respect human beings
owe each other entails respect for persons’ equal and symmetrical freedom to
choose and shape their own destinies. Thus, to the extent to which parents can
and do program their children’s destiny genetically, this core normative principle
is violated. Three objections immediately spring to mind: (1) that genetic screen-
ing and manipulation can never shape a person’s destiny in the requisite sense,
(2) that these asymmetries are nothing new but simply an extension of standard
forms of parental influence, and (3) that if the problem with genetic influence
lies with its asymmetrical character, then it is unclear why any genetic screening
is permissible.
Regarding objection 1: Habermas’s talk of influencing a child’s future ca-
reer via prenatal “genetic programming” sounds biologically naive, and his ten-
dency to discuss cloning and preimplantation diagnosis in one breath suggests
an understanding of the taxonomies of genetic intervention that falls short of
the level of scientific sophistication currently expected of bioethicists. For his
argument to work, however, all he actually needs is not that there be a gene
for, say, being a brilliant lawyer but only that there be genetic interventions that
generate physical features that channel a person toward certain life choices.
Take the (not implausible) case of preimplantation screening for physical height.
As Habermas acknowledges in other cases, even if parents succeeded in causing
their son to be very, very tall—in the hope that he become an exceptional
basketball player—it is still open to the son to select a different path, for example,
as part of the developmentally typical “adolescent crisis.” But in a way, this
freedom is a bit like the “freedom” to reject a so-called sexual offer (career
advancement in exchange for sexual favors): the fact that the opportunity can
be turned down does not eliminate the perniciousness of having been put in
the situation in the first place. The violation lies in being forced into an im-
possible position.
A very tall friend of mine once had a T-shirt made that says, “Yes, I really
am 7
3

—and NO, I DON’T PLAY BASKETBALL.” He was sick of his conver-
sations with strangers or first-time acquaintances being monopolized by discus-
sion of his height. In the case of my friend, this is an unfortunate circumstance
of fate and chance. But imagine that his height was his parents’ doing in much
more than the usual sense. The aggravating experience of others presuming
to know that he is a basketball player would then be an external imposition
that he cannot escape. It is a concern with this sort of framing of a person
by others that lies at the heart of Habermas’s concern with libertarian attitudes
toward genetic enhancement.
Before I return to the other two objections, a bit more needs to be said
about Habermas’s argument. Habermas sometimes writes as if the central issue
were one of psychological harm, frequently speculating about how the discovery

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818 Ethics July 2005

of having been subjected to genetic programming would leave a person feeling.

But this way of running the argument not only represents just the sort of con-
sequentialism that Habermas has always opposed but also relies on highly spec-
ulative empirical claims. After all, there is likely to be as much variation in how
a person responds to learning of being subjected to genetic programming as
there is to learning that one was conceived by artificial insemination.
The real key to Habermas’s argument is that human personhood and moral
agency presuppose certain modes of relating to oneself that are threatened by
the asymmetrical way in which genetic enhancements would presumably work.
Thus, instead of taking up and then extending familiar normative concerns
about unequal opportunities or the criteria for moral personhood, Habermas
believes that the emerging technologies of genetic enhancement demand gen-
uinely new arguments, and he proposes to focus on the effects of genetic pro-
gramming on whether the agent can consider herself free and equal—effects,
that is, regarding what one might call the reflexive attitudinal preconditions for
moral agency. “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” (79). In particular, knowing that one’s life had been viewed
by one’s parents instrumentally—as their project—makes it hard to see oneself
as on equal footing with them or even as the author of one’s own life history.
This is an intriguing proposal, but much of what Habermas has to say is more
suggestive than fully worked out. For example, Habermas needs to do more to
address the tension already mentioned between empirical claims about how
people are psychologically affected by these genetic practices and more meta-
physical claims about the way in which certain practices and relationships affect
a person’s normative status. Sometimes he seems to be claiming that people will
have psychological difficulties thinking of themselves as self-determining or free
and equal; at other times, it seems as if no amount of psychological resilience
could prevent the loss of status. The dilemma is that unless we think of the one-
sided instrumentalization of a child’s genetic inheritance as reflected in the
child’s actual subjective experience, it is hard see why it is such a pressing moral
concern, but the more the wrongness is tied to felt suffering, the harder it is
to say anything categorical about the wrongness of genetic enhancement, as
Habermas wishes to do. This is a fundamental challenge facing attempts to draw
normative conclusions from philosophical reflections on the nature of human
personhood (what the Germans term Anthropologie)—a tension, incidentally, that
also plagues recent discussions over whether self-esteem depends psychologically
or constitutively on relations of mutual recognition.
The mention of Anthropologie brings us back to the second objection men-
tioned above, the question of whether genetic technology introduces an asym-
metry that is really so distinct and new. For even if one grants Habermas’s point
about how programming a child’s future undermines the reflexive attitudinal
preconditions for full moral agency, one might still wonder whether the real
threat doesn’t lie instead with ordinary parenting practices. Relentless training
in sports, language, or music seems to be at least as powerful an instrument of
this pernicious influence as is genetic “programming”—and far more wide-
spread. Habermas recognizes the concern, and his reply here is intriguing. He

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 Book Reviews 819

grants that, in a sense, “positive” eugenics and early childhood training (as well
as various forms of indoctrination) lie on a continuum of practices by which a
person is subjected to “alien determination” (Fremdbestimmung) by her parents.
The difference, he argues, lies in the way genetic “programming” moves the site
of identity contestation beyond the reach of those being programmed. In the
familiar case of parental attempts to instill certain traits and attitudes in chil-
dren—or even to condition their bodies—it is open to the children (and is often
an important developmental dimension of adolescence) to take issue with their
parents about whether to retain those traits and attitudes and, in many cases,
to modify or eliminate them. By contrast, Habermas suggests, “genetically fixed
‘demands’ cannot, strictly speaking, be responded to” (51). The idea seems to
be that no matter how profoundly difficult it may be to undo the effects of one’s
upbringing or how impossible it may be to alter one’s childhood circumstances,
the struggle to (re)claim one’s life history and one’s subjectively lived embod-
iment (Habermas here notes a debt to Helmuth Plessner) occurs in the same
intersubjective space in which parents exercise sociocultural influence. By con-
trast, the genetic programming of a child’s height operates within a domain of
natural causation entirely removed from the mode of contestation that char-
acterizes, say, a contentious family therapy session.
The more Habermas bases his critique of the perniciousness of genetic
manipulation and selection on asymmetries between generations, however, the
more pressing the third objection becomes: doesn’t this argument entail that
even life-saving, misery-reducing forms of genetic intervention ought to be pro-
hibited? Habermas believes he can avoid this implication by arguing that con-
cerns about asymmetry dissolve if we can anticipate the subsequent consent of
the person whose suffering is being prevented. According to Habermas, what
is different in permissible cases of genetic interventions is the motivating attitude:
in place of the instrumental attitude of parents using their offspring to fulfill
their own dreams, we find the defeasible anticipation of consent that is char-
acteristic of an urgent care doctor treating an unconscious patient (52).
There are serious problems, however, with this part of the argument. To
begin with, it starts to look as if the whole innovation of focusing on asymmetry
is actually superfluous, since anticipated consent turns out to be all that matters.
More seriously, I think, Habermas seems unaware of the floodgates he is opening,
in part because he seems to underestimate the extent to which genetic en-
hancements are motivated by genuinely good intentions. If the only real con-
straint on genetic screening and manipulation is that an intervention be ac-
companied by “the clinical attitude of the first person toward another person—
however virtual—who, some time in the future, may encounter him in the role
of a second person” (52), then it is hard to see any but the most extreme cases
of perverse experimentation being excluded.
The appeal to anticipated consent also points to an issue likely to be raised
by those familiar with Habermas’s moral theory: the question of how to under-
stand our obligations vis-à-vis potential persons. Like contractarians and Kantians
more generally, Habermas faces difficulties accommodating the intuition that
we might have obligations toward potential persons. The difficulty is particularly
pronounced in the case of Habermas’s “discourse theory of morality,” since it
construes the moral point of view in terms of processes of deliberation among

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820 Ethics July 2005

all those affected by the norm at issue which the participants consider in the
deliberative process to be open, fair, and inclusive. Future generations do not
fit neatly into this deliberative process, nor do prepersonal humans. Moral norms
adjudicated in such discourse clearly affect their interests, but they cannot them-
selves participate in the discourse. In the past, Habermas and other “discourse
ethicists” have tried to address this worry by introducing “advocatory discourses.”
But this move threatens to undo a distinctive, appealing feature of Habermas’s
moral theory: the pragmatist insistence on the innovative, critical, unpredictable
discourse generated by actual participants in discourse and the refusal (contra
Rawls, in particular) to rely on hypothetical representatives.
In The Future of Human Nature, Habermas ventures a different strategy, focused
on expanding what he calls the “ethical” domain, which differs from the “moral”
domain in being a matter of a community’s articulation of its core values and
conception of the good. Previously, Habermas distinguished “ethical-existential”
and “ethical-political” domains, as a matter of who an individual or a community,
respectively, is and wants to be. In the present book, Habermas makes the re-
markable move of introducing the category of the “species-ethical,” which is sup-
posed to be the domain of questions raised by the human species as a whole about
the question of what it is to be human. This theoretical move extends further
steps Habermas had already taken in speaking of ethical solidarity within the global
community.
According to Habermas, it is at the level of species-ethics that we can answer
the question, somewhat indirectly, of what we owe to those potential persons
whose genetic makeup we will soon be (and, in part, already are) in a position
to influence. The idea is that it is a fundamental value, connected with the idea
of what it is to be a free and equal person, that one not view others’ life tra-
jectories as at one’s disposal. This Unverfügbarkeit of human beings (confusingly
translated here as “nondisposability”) is not something that can be demanded
within moral discourse, for it forms the condition for the possibility of partici-
pating at all. According to Habermas, just as the question “Why be moral?”
cannot be answered in terms of moral obligations to be moral—but only in
terms of an account of why it makes sense, given who one is and wants to be,
for one to care about being moral—so our concern for ensuring that future
persons’ status as free and equal moral participants is not compromised is ul-
timately to be found only in an account of what we view as distinctively valuable
aspects of being human.
It must be said that this idea of “ethical” values clarification at the level of
the species is perhaps the most speculative idea in a book that is characterized
by an innovative élan and a significant number of promissory notes. For it is
entirely unclear, to begin with, how this species-ethics is supposed to generate
the individual obligations demanded by the gravity of genetic interventions or
how we are supposed to imagine this process of reflection and self-clarification
occurring on a global scale—assuming that Habermas still wishes to avoid the
model of deducing values along the lines of monological and metaphysical
Anthropologie. At the same time, this may turn out to be the metaethical move
that is forced on defenders of Kantian moral theory when confronted with the
real and urgent issues of the status of future generations. Every system of phil-
osophical ethics has issues it handles well and issues that it handles awkwardly.

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 Book Reviews 821

For Kantians and contractarians, the issue of what we owe potential persons may
be the sort of issue where one is willing to accept the account only because the
theoretical package of which it is a part is preferable to competing packages.
Whether or not he has succeeded in providing the most convincing answer to
the question, however, it is greatly to Habermas’s credit that he has squarely
faced this issue, despite the fundamental challenge it poses for discourse ethics.

Joel Anderson
Utrecht University

Ignatieff, Michael. The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. xii⫹212. $22.95 (cloth).

How should a democratic state fight terrorism? This is the question discussed
by Michael Ignatieff in his latest book. This is how he sees the dilemma: “When
democracies fight terrorism, they are defending the proposition that their polit-
ical life should be free of violence. But defeating terror requires violence . . . ,
coercion, deception, secrecy, and violation of rights. How can democracies resort
to these means without destroying the value for which they stand?” (vii).
Ignatieff explores three possible positions as a response to this question.
The first position is “a morality of consequences,” according to which “measures
which aim to save lives and preserve the security of the citizens cannot be wrong
if they actually succeed in doing so” (7–8). Ignatieff associates this position with
an account of democracy as a “synonym for majority rule” (3) “disciplined by
checks and balances” (5), with the view that “a country facing a terrorist emer-
gency” should disregard “international agreements and conventions,” and with
the view “that the lives of your own citizens matter more than the lives of people
in other countries” (7).
The second position is “a morality of dignity,” which accords individuals
with “intrinsic respect . . . in the form of rights that guarantee certain freedoms”
(5). According to Ignatieff’s construal of this view, “no violations of rights can
ever be justified” (viii).
Ignatieff endorses a third position, “a lesser evil morality,” which takes ac-
count of both consequences and rights. According to this view, a violation of
rights might be justified in order to protect security, but this “would not prevent
it from remaining wrong” (8).
This account raises several puzzles. First, it conflates the metaethical puzzle
regarding the existence of moral dilemmas in which all options are wrong and
the controversy between substantive moral theories. These issues are related: a
view in one level may have implications regarding the other; for example, the
view that there are true moral dilemmas might be incompatible with conse-
quentialism. But these issues are nevertheless distinct: different substantive moral
theories are compatible with various views regarding the existence of moral
dilemmas. Particularly, Ignatieff’s metaethical view—that there are true moral
dilemmas—and his substantive moral view—that both consequences and rights
matter—do not entail one another. The balance between consequences and
rights might always yield a morally correct answer. Nevertheless, Ignatieff does

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