J Value Inquiry (2011) 45:279–291 DOI 10.1007/s10790-011-9291-z

Primary Goods, Contingency, and the Moral Challenge of Genetic Enhancement Somogy Varga

Published online: 26 October 2011  Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

1 Moral Vertigo With the advances in biomedical sciences over the last decade and the possibility of genetic interventions becoming less speculative, it is natural that ethical questions concerning this uncharted territory have moved into the focus of philosophical debates. It is now considered a possibility that we will reach a level of biotechnological knowledge that would provide the technical means to genetically intervene to cure and radically enhance human life in the near future, forming, as Allen Buchanan says, ‘‘important biological characteristics of the human beings we choose to bring into existence.’’1 Even if with current scientific sophistication, such prenatal enhancement techniques are not genuine possibilities, their possibility can alone be instructive in thinking about ethics and morality.2 As Eduarto Mendieta has observed, biotechnology, and its application ‘‘demand that we reflect on what it means to be human in an age in which human nature is up for grabs.’’3

1

Allen Buchanan, et al., From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 1; see also S. Mathew Liao, Julian Savulescu, and David Wasserman, ‘‘The Ethics of Enhancement,’’ Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 25, no. 3, 2008.

2

Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 2000); see also Michael Sandel, The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).

3 Eduarto Mendieta, ‘‘Habermas on Human Cloning,’’ Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 30, no. 5–6, 2004, p. 722.

S. Varga University of Osnabru¨ck, Osnabru¨ck, Germany S. Varga (&) Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 140-142, 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark e-mail: [email protected]

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While different forms of enhancement are likely to become possible, it is with regard to questions concerning prenatal genetic technologies that the current advancements of biomedical sciences really bring qualitatively new problems that challenge our moral systems.4 Here we may speak of an asymmetrical relation, because we intervene in the lives of future persons, without their informed consent. Michael Sandel, Ronald Dworkin and Ju¨rgen Habermas have explained how the challenges give rise to a moral vertigo and revulsion. Sandel writes: ‘‘When science moves faster than moral understanding, as it does today, men and women struggle to articulate their unease. In liberal societies they reach first for the language of autonomy, fairness, and individual rights. But this part of our moral vocabulary is ill equipped to address the hardest questions posed by genetic engineering. The genomic revolution has induced a kind of moral vertigo.’’5 Dworkin notes: ‘‘People feel some deeper, less articulate ground for that revulsion, even if they have not or perhaps cannot fully articulate that ground, but can express it only in heated and logically inappropriate language.’’6 As Habermas has it: ‘‘It is the feeling of vertigo that seizes us when the ground beneath our feet, which is believed to be solid, begins to slip.’’7 Moral vertigo and feelings of revulsion have motivated unconditional condemnations of biotechnologies that would eventually allow genetic intervention. Some critics make recourse to a notion of human nature informed by religious metaphysics and condemn such endeavors as attempts of playing God.8 However, there are good reasons to doubt the adequacy of such criticism. Similar criticisms were raised in connection with countless earlier advances in medical technology, such as anesthesia, birth control, and organ transplantation. As well, while such criticism displays a dubious notion of creation and a fixed human nature, some philosophers would argue that changing human nature is what really characterizes the nature of man. In a different way, philosophers such as Dworkin, Sandel, Habermas, and Buchanan, have argued that the moral vertigo may be a sign that we are facing a qualitatively different issue from issues earlier addressed in the fields of medical ethics and bioethics that would radically displace the boundary between nature, culture, chance, and choice. This distinction has been expressed in several ways in more or less metaphysically burdened disguises, and it has shaped our selfunderstanding and moral experience. The displacement of the boundary forces us to fundamentally rethink our ways of inquiring into our self-understanding as human beings, the moral status of human bodies, the lines between nature, culture, chance, and choice, and the boundary between what is at our disposal and what lies beyond it. Dworkin, Sandel, Habermas, and Buchanan agree to a large extent that in order to 4

See Thomas Douglas, ‘‘Moral Enhancement,’’ Journal of Applied Philosophy vol. 25, 2008; see also Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, ‘‘The Perils of Cognitive Enhancement and the Urgent Imperative to Enhance the Moral Character of Humanity,’’ Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 25, 2008.

5

Sandel, op. cit., p. 51.

6

Dworkin, op. cit., p. 443.

7

Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge, England: Polity Press 2003), p. 39.

8

See Lenny Moss, ‘‘Contra Habermas and Towards a Critical Theory of Human Nature and the Question of Genetic Enhancement,’’ New Formations vol. 60, 2007; see also Dworkin, op.cit.

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draw the boundary of the moral permissibility of genetic enhancement, we need a modified or even new moral vocabulary that allows us to confront the challenge.

2 From Old Eugenics to Liberal Eugenics A long shadow of eugenic practices in the last century clouds the contemporary debate about genetic enhancement. It is well-documented how American and European eugenics movements, fueled by the aspiration to improve humankind, reached a terrible culmination under the Nazi regime. State eugenic policies were used to coerce mass sterilization, with an aim to eliminate genetically unfit or deviant individuals. In light of this, some critics maintain that future practices of genetic enhancement and so-called designer children would merely be new, and privatized versions of old eugenics. In contrast, proponents of eugenics argue that the problematic practices of eugenics can be avoided by ensuring that only the free choices of parents should determine decisions on reproductive selection concerning offspring. This is intended to protect against state coercion and to secure that gene pools of individuals, not broad groups, provide a point of reference. Nicholas Agar maintains that such a decisive step from old eugenics to liberal eugenics transforms an evil doctrine into a doctrine that is morally acceptable.9 Robert Nozick and Peter Singer even welcome the possibility of a genetic supermarket, if no centralized agency intervenes to fix the future of human nature or even interferes by promoting specific traits and characteristics.10 For proponents of liberal eugenics, asymmetric genetic interventions are conceptualized as extensions of basic reproductive liberty.11 For instance, Singer, Agar and James Hughes, Buchanan, Dan Brock, Norman Daniels, and Daniel Wikler suggest that we should extend our conception of individual rights and consider asymmetrical genetic enhancement under the heading of an extended conception of the individual right to reproductive freedom.12 Parents should be granted not only a negative right to avert and interrupt pregnancy, but also a positive right to take whatever necessary and possible steps to having a child that lives up their ideal.13 Also, instead of fixing the boundaries of enhancement with recourse to a distinction between therapy and enhancement, the general view is that genetic enhancement is permissible as far as the principles of non-maleficence as well as justice can be sustained. Additionally, some philosophers argue that in order to prevent social inequalities from growing into even greater genetic inequalities, there must be equal access to such technologies and a fair distribution of their advantages 9 Nicholas Agar, Liberal Eugenics: In Defense of Human Enhancement (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 135. 10 See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. (New York: Basic Books, 1974) and Peter Singer, ‘‘Shopping at the Genetic Supermarket,’’ in Song, Sang-Yong, et al. eds., Asian Bioethics in the 21st Century (Tsukuba, Japan: University of Tsukuba Publishing 2003). 11

See Dov Fox ‘‘The Illiberality of ‘Liberal Eugenics’,’’ Ratio, vol. 20, no. 1, 2007.

12

See Buchanan et al., op. cit, pp. 304–344.

13

See Singer op.cit; see also Julian Savulescu, ‘‘Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children,’’ Bioethics, vol. 15, no. 5–6, 2001, and Agar, op. cit.

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and costs.14 Philosophers who take this position hold that to a certain extent it is morally permissible for parents to decide which genetically desirable factors should shape the development their offspring. The permissibility of genetic enhancement is safe, because the right to genetically extended reproductive freedom is clearly constrained by formal requirements of justice that protect the freedoms of others. At the same time, such procreative rights are also thought to provide the measure to prevent unacceptable enhancement practices such as coerced eugenics. Proponents of liberal eugenics make an analogy to conventional, educational, childrearing practices to provide moral justification for their view. Singer, Agar, Buchanan, and John A. Robinson argue that there is no important moral difference between genetic enhancement and traditional, commonly accepted childrearing methods, or improvements by various manipulations of the environment, such as education or nutrition.15 Both methods are directed at the same kind of enhancement.16 Since we regularly entrust to parents the decisions about childrearing practices, we have no convincing reasons to withhold them the right to make decisions about genetic enhancements for their offspring. The strength of the argument depends on the soundness of the analogy between commonly accepted practices of enhancement by education and childrearing and enhancement by biogenetic technologies. However, there is evidence that counts against the plausibility of the analogy. The difference between education, childrearing and enhancement by biogenetic technologies is qualitative and morally relevant. For instance, Sandel and Habermas convincingly maintain that genetic enhancement is qualitatively different with respect to all personal and institutional postnatal education, childrearing, and socialization in general, since prenatal genetic interventions are irreversible. Processes of socialization take place by interactive and communicative actions, where a child is granted a position as the second person, from which the interventions of the parents become contestable and retrospectively revisable. The case is different with prenatal genetic interventions, because in such a case attempts of revision from the part of the child are not possible.17 Even if genetic enhancements were not qualitatively different than accepted practices, the analogy already undermines radically liberal positions that are advanced with an aim to completely entrust to parents the decisions about the genetic enhancements. On this view, parents should be granted the right to choose the characteristics of the offspring from a catalogue or genetic supermarket.18 However, it is clear that in liberal societies practices of education and childrearing are not entirely left to parents. While schooling for children is mandatory, not all kinds of child rearing practices are morally accepted or legal. For instance, practices 14 See Jonathan Glover Choosing Children Genes, Disability, and Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006), p. 103; see also Buchanan et al., op. cit. 15 See Agar, op. cit., p. 172; see also Buchanan et al., op. cit.; and John A. Robertson, Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technologies (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 167, and Glover, op. cit., p. 79. 16

See Agar, op. cit., p. 113.

17

See Habermas, op.cit, p. 51.

18

See James Hughes ‘‘Embracing Change with all Four Arms,’’ Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics, vol. 6, no. 4, 1996; see also Singer, op. cit., and Nozick, op. cit.

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involving physical or emotional abuse are not. In liberal societies, it is sometimes held to be appropriate to intervene to alter the childrearing practices of parents.19 Thus, if we are to be consistent with respect to the analogy and simultaneously take into account the fact that in liberal societies such practices are in some cases regulated by the state, then there is no reason why parents should be entrusted exclusive control over decisions about genetic enhancements. In fact, this would be in line with the legislative restriction on reproductive freedom already enforced. In some liberal societies, due to a biological risk to offspring, there is legislation against marriage between close relatives such as first cousins. Because of the greatly increased genetic risks for a child of closely related parents, government legislation restricts reproductive freedom. The implication of the argument from analogy is that in matters of genetic enhancement the question of permissibility is neither to be settled by the parents nor by state-regulation. Instead, the key aspect on which the moral permissibility of genetic enhancement hinges must be the autonomy of the offspring. Both parental and state measures of regulation must allow for the primacy of individual autonomy. Buchanan, Fox, Glover, and Fritz Allhoff present accounts of liberal eugenics to define the morally permissible boundaries of enhancement by relying on the idea of primary goods promoted by John Rawls.20 Rawls argues that in a liberal society a state may intervene to ensure the distribution of primary goods, resources that improve the chances of children to attain the kind of life they might choose. Primary goods are ‘‘things that every rational man is presumed to want. These goods normally have a use whatever a person’s rational plan of life.’’21 Such primary goods are neutral and independent with respect to any particular conception of a good life and provide the preconditions for autonomy, in the sense of a capacity to choose and engage in life plans free of coercion. Rawls invites us to imagine an original position, in which individuals take a stand on the principles that should govern a just society, but do so under a veil of ignorance, without possessing knowledge of vital aspects such as their social status, talents and abilities, intelligence or strength and their idea of what a good life amounts to. The individuals lack the kind of knowledge that may typically incite people to seek advantages on morally irrelevant grounds such as natural endowment, race, or sex. Rawls assumes that individuals in such a position would nevertheless attempt to act in a way that would advance their interests and exhibit a preference for more primary goods. In such a case, individuals would advance their interests by ensuring the equal distribution of primary goods. Since primary goods are necessary conditions for the realization of any idea of a good life, their distribution does not promote any particular idea of a good life. While Rawls distinguishes between social primary goods such as ‘‘rights and liberties, powers and opportunities, income and wealth’’ and natural primary goods such as ‘‘health and vigor, intelligence and imagination,’’ both are neutral resources 19

See Fox, op. cit, p. 24.

20

See Buchanan et al., op. cit.; see also, Fox, op. cit., and Fritz Allhoff, ‘‘Germ-Line Genetic Enhancement and Rawlsian Primary Goods,’’ Journal of Evolution and Technology, vol. 18, no. 1, 2008. 21

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 62.

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that are required to make autonomous choices about any kind of good.22 For instance we can expect that basic education enhances general emotional and cognitive traits in children, and provides them with social skills that are needed for any life plan they may choose. Rawls does not regard the list of primary goods that he offers to be completely fixed, but only as provisional. In Justice as Fairness, he expands the list and includes basic healthcare and leisure time. Liberal eugenicists like Buchanan, Allhoff, and Fox take a leaf from Rawls and argue that we must also include some genetic goods into the category of natural goods, heritable capacities that are valuable in order to attain all kinds of visions of a good life. Alhoff maintains that genetic enhancements ‘‘are morally permissible if and only if they augment primary goods or create abilities that would lead to their augmentation.’’23 Allhoff includes mental characteristics that strengthen talents and overall intelligence such as ‘‘improvements to eyesight, speed, strength, and the like… mental acuity, mathematical and spatial reasoning, language faculties, creativity, musical abilities.’’24 In his list of such natural goods, Fox includes ‘‘absence of disability, resistance against disease, physical mobility and coordination, visual and auditory perception, short- and long-term memory, verbal and spatial reasoning, general cognitive capacity, and certain behavioral characteristics such as reflectivity, impulse control, novelty seeking, and the capacity to abide adversity.’’25 For such proponents of liberal eugenics, enhancement is morally permissible in the case of such genetic primary goods, because the enhanced capacity is universal, neutral on particular conceptions of a good life, and does not push the offspring into adopting any particular life plan. By distinguishing between primary and secondary goods, Buchanan, Fox, and Allhoff find a way to define the morally permissible boundaries of enhancement. While primary natural goods are permissible, secondary goods such as height, sex, sociability, loyalty, and generosity are not.26 The point is that such secondary characteristics are not useful whatever the life plan of a person may be, and a rational agent could prefer not to have them. We cannot expect that all rational agents would consent to having such characteristics. They depend on valueladen assumptions about a good life that are not in complete accord with the assumptions made by liberal pluralists about human flourishing. Rawls maintains that a procedurally structured fair construction of principles of justice and rightness in liberal democracies must be prior to and unbiased by specific and comprehensive conceptions of a good life. Rawls notes that in order to establish the principles we must rely on some thin notion of goodness.27 However, his claim is that such a thin notion is morally neutral, suitable for all rational individuals whatever their ethical orientation. However, we may ask how neutral and thin primary goods really are. The concern is that in relying on an assumed preference 22

Rawls, op. cit., p. 396.

23

Allhoff, op.cit., p. 20.

24

Ibid., p. 21.

25

Fox, op. cit, p. 11.

26

See Fox, op. cit, p. 12; see also Allhoff, op. cit., p. 21.

27

See Rawls, op. cit, p. 396.

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for primary goods for the construction of principles of justice and rightness, Rawls introduces a non-neutral dimension. If this is the case, then the whole foundation of liberal eugenics that relies on the neutrality of primary goods is unstable. To see if this is the situation, we need to understand how the assumption of a preference for primary goods is justified by Rawls. It seems that there are two possibilities. Either Rawls assumes that all rational individuals have this preference or that rational individuals normally have this preference. By and large, Rawls seems to opt for the first possibility. He says: ‘‘But I have also assumed that the parties do not know their conception of the good. This means that while they know that they have some rational plan of life, they do not know the details of this plan, the particular ends and interests which it is calculated to promote. How, then, can they decide which conceptions of justice are most to their advantage?… To meet this difficulty, I postulate that they accept the account of the good touched upon in the preceding chapter: they assume that they would prefer more primary social goods rather than less. Of course, it may turn out, once the veil of ignorance is removed, that some of them for religious or other reasons may not, in fact, want more of these goods. But from the standpoint of the original position, it is rational for the parties to suppose that they do want a larger share.’’28 Here, Rawls leans toward the position that rational individuals normally have such preferences for primary goods. Rawls justifies his theory by recourse to an assumption about the general preferences of rational individuals, and thereby justifies his assumption about primary goods on an ethical decision to further the preferences of most people.29 However, some problems arise. Rawls acknowledges that while all rational individuals have a preference for a certain amount of the primary goods, some rational individuals might prefer a greater amount, while others might oppositely prefer less. Yet, this raises the possibility of cases where a rational individual with a preference for less of a particular primary good can claim to be hindered in pursuing his vision of a good life by the public furtherance of the good. This might be the case for a monk or a socialist. A monk may believe that a good life crucially involves being selflessly devoted to a life of contemplation and prayer, while a socialist may believe that a good life is achievable entirely through labor. Each may think that any possession of wealth can morally corrupt them and hinder their life plan. Additionally, they may each think that the concept of the basic good of liberty hinders their spiritual or socialist idea of a good life.30 Some primary goods can be hindrances to the realization of certain life plans. In offering his account, Rawls makes recourse to a thick theory concerning primary goods. On his account, there are reasons to doubt that some genetic primary goods can be neutral and helpful for the realization of any particular life plan. The suggested primary natural goods involve physical mobility and coordination, visual and auditory perception, short- and long-term memory, verbal and spatial reasoning, 28

Rawls, op.cit., pp. 142–143.

29

See Adina Schwartz, ‘‘Moral Neutrality and Primary Goods,’’’ Ethics, vol. 83, no. 4, 1973.

30

See Thomas Nagel ‘‘Rawls on Justice,’’ The Philosophical Review, vol. 82, no. 2, 1973; see also Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

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general cognitive capacity, reflectiveness, impulse control, novelty seeking, and the capacity to abide adversity, speed, strength, mental acuity, mathematical and spatial reasoning, language faculties, creativity, and musical abilities. But not even something as something as natural as normal auditory perception can unconditionally be identified as a primary natural good. In the past two decades, we have witnessed the emergence of novel medical solutions to the problem of hearing loss. For instance, the novel cochlear implants compensate for damaged auditory nerves and thereby restore normal auditory perception. However, the implants have met resistance. Advocates of the deaf-culture movement, argue that deaf people are not disabled, but merely constitute a visually oriented subculture or linguistic community.31 Because deafness is not considered a handicap by them, but instead as something constitutive for an identity of a community and a crucial component in what they view as a good life, advocates of the deaf-culture movement consider cochlear implants as offensive. Similarly, some people think of blindness in terms of difference instead of disability, while maintaining that sighted people place too much weight on seeing and too little on information brought to us by the other senses and language.32 While this shows that normal auditory perception is not a neutral primary good, the same point can arguably be made with respect to all the natural primary goods that Buchanan, Allhoff, and Fox invoke. If neutrality of such primary goods is not guaranteed, liberal eugenicists face an impasse. For liberal eugenicists, genetic enhancement is morally permissible in the case of genetic features that can count as primary goods, because the enhanced capacity is neutral on particular conceptions of a good life. If such primary goods are not neutral and if liberal eugenicists are committed to protecting the autonomy of offspring, then they must question the permissibility of enhancing such traits.

3 The Restrictive View: Species Ethics To draw the boundaries for permissible measures of enhancement, Habermas starts from the liberal conviction that in modern, pluralistic societies rightness has priority over particular, value-laden configurations of goodness. However, contrary to liberal eugenicists, Habermas argues for a restrictive view of genetic enhancement, except in the case of preventing disease. Also in contrast to liberal eugenicists, Habermas thinks that the dislocation of chance and choice not only challenges our moral system but also exceeds the boundaries of its capacity. Therefore, questions regarding the future possibility of genetic enhancement can neither be determined by applying conventional norms, nor by the initiation of new norms on the basis of abstract universalist principles. Instead, for Habermas, the challenge of genetic enhancement touches on the fundamental, normative self-understanding that our 31 See Bonnie P. Tucker ‘‘Deafness—Disability or Subculture: The Emerging Conflict,’’ Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy vol. 3, 1994; see also Bonnie P. Tucker, ‘‘Deaf Culture, Cochlear Implants, and Elective Disability,’’ The Hastings Center Report vol. 28, no. 4, 1998. 32

See Glover, op. cit., p. 16.

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universalist moral principles rely on. To sustain his restrictive view, Habermas presents two lines of argument. In his first line of argument, Habermas reconfirms his usual standpoint and argues for a reasonable pluralism regarding conceptions of what is good in liberal democracies and emphasizes the priority of what is right. However, he adds a novel dimension by arguing that the priority of what is right is not ontologically fixed but sustained and dependent on ‘‘a prior ethical self-understanding of the species, which is shared by all moral persons.’’33 It is our frameworks of understanding ourselves as human beings provided by religious metaphysics and humanist world-views that have offered the soil from which universalistic moral system grew out.34 He says that our moral life is embedded in an anthropological self-understanding that makes up a ‘‘context that must endure if morality itself is not to start slipping.’’35 The possibility of genetic enhancement affects our self-understanding not as members of a certain cultural, religious or national community, but, as he put it, ‘‘as members of the species.’’36 They affect, he says, ‘‘those intuitive self-descriptions that guide our own identification as human beings—that is, our self-understanding as members of the species.’’37 Habermas adds that ‘‘they concern not culture, which is different everywhere, but the vision different cultures have of a ‘man’ who—in his anthropological universality— is everywhere the same.’’38 The argument is that with anthropological self-understanding challenged by genetic engineering, the backdrop of a universalistic moral system and the priority of what is right over what is good could lose its basis. The first line of argument that Habermas offers represents a shift from his earlier work. ‘‘Ethics’’ is used in a specific way in the German tradition. Like Ernst Tugendhat, Habermas draws a distinction between ‘‘ethics’’ and ‘‘morality.’’ ‘‘Ethics’’ is used to refer to questions about what is good or valuable in the life someone seeks to attain and that are important to sustaining personal identities. ‘‘Morality’’ is used to refer to the rules, norms, and principles of justice that regulate the plurality of conceptions of what is good in the equal interest of everyone. The use of ‘‘species ethics’’ by Habermas reveals that the challenge of genetic engineering is not connected with questions of what is right, but with evaluative questions of what is good. ‘‘Species ethics’’ functions as a formal term on which we build the term ‘‘morality.’’ The system of morality depends on a prior understanding of what is good, expressed in terms of ‘‘species ethics.’’ This stands more as a postulate than as a carefully argued point. The crucial claim about our overlapping self-understanding as members of the species regardless of cultural heritage is doubtful for several reasons. The epistemological status of the claim is unclear in as much as it is not clear whether it is a philosophical or an empirical claim. We may ask whether it is necessarily or contingently the case that the understandings of what 33

Habermas op.cit., p. 40.

34

See Courtois, op cit.

35

Habermas, op.cit., p. 67.

36

Ibid., pp. 38–40.

37

Ibid., p. 39.

38

Ibid.

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it is to be a person in different cultures coincide. Without a robust underpinning, postulating such a common ground among cultures, whether empirically or philosophically, begs the question. Thus, as it stands, this argument from the anthropological self-identity of the species is too vague to help us settle the question concerning the permissibility of genetic enhancement. While our self-understanding as moral persons is arguably conditioned by understanding ourselves as members of a species, without further arguments it is too speculative to maintain that a certain change in the self-understanding of the species will affect our moral landscape in a certain way. While this line of argument is problematic, another line of argument is possible. We could say that the dilemmas of genetic intervention are not adequately captured within the traditional moral vocabulary of autonomy and individual rights, not because of some anthropological self-understanding of the species, but simply because our concept of autonomy is inadequate. Habermas paves the way toward such a full concept of autonomy. Following a second line of argument, Habermas sees the implementation of genetic manipulation as impermissible, because of an asymmetric paternalism in which prenatal enhancement intervention that prestructures the identity of individuals not yet born, endangers the equality and autonomy. He writes: ‘‘We cannot rule out that knowledge of one’s own hereditary features as programmed may prove to restrict the choice of an individual’s life, and to undermine the essentially symmetrical relations between free and equal human beings.’’39 Genetic intervention does not touch on the civic freedom of the resulting person but on the presuppositions of civic freedom, the possibility of a person to experience himself as the sole author of his own biography. Habermas has to show that genetic enhancement is qualitatively different from all personal and institutional postnatal socialization. The difference is that prenatal, genetic interventions are irreversible. Processes of socialization proceed by communicative actions, which are interactive and in which a child is granted a position as the second person, from which the interventions of the parents become contestable and retrospectively revisable. The case is different with prenatal, genetic intervention, because attempts at revision by the child are not possible. This is why the sense of reciprocity and symmetry constitutive to the sense of moral egalitarianism is undermined. Such a process, according to Habermas, ‘‘jeopardizes a precondition for the moral self-understanding of autonomous actors’’ as of equal dignity.40 The point is that the intervening parent will asymmetrically impose her preferences upon the foetus, treating it as a prolongation of herself, or as something that may be tailored to suit her expectations rather than as a potential autonomous individual. There will be an objectifying and instrumental use of the body of the offspring that becomes available to the interests of others. As Habermas puts it: ‘‘For as soon as adults treat the desirable genetic traits of their descendants as a product they can shape according to a design of their own liking, they are exercising a kind of control over their genetically manipulated offspring that intervenes in the somatic bases of another person’s spontaneous 39

Ibid., p. 51.

40

Ibid., p. 63.

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relation-to-self and ethical freedom.’’41 On the second line of argument, genetically engineering a foetus jeopardizes his future status as free and equal moral agent, as bearer of elementary rights and obligations, since the knowledge of being designed instrumentally makes it difficult to for a person to experience himself as the author of his own life history and gain autonomy. As Habermas says, ‘‘we experience our own freedom with reference to something which, by its very nature, is not at our disposal.’’42 While this second line of argument line is promising, Habermas does not elaborate the conception of autonomy that underlies his account.

4 Contingency as a Primary Good When addressing the supposed value of contingency for the beginning of a life, we need to clarify the sources of such value and the concept of contingency in question. For this, it is useful to imagine several possible positions that would support the value of such contingency.43 A person with religious conviction might opt for such a view, maintaining that humanity should not interfere with the process of life, which, being God’s creation, is an inherently purposeful process. In such case, the value of the undisposability of future persons and the contingency of the beginning of a life derives from its being God’s creation. The concept of contingency in question would concern something that seems contingent to us humans who fare without the insight of God. Alternatively, a person with a quasi-religious motivation might argue that in order to be able to gain moral autonomy and full personhood we must be able to think of our origin as created by something like a higher, transcendent power. Such a person could draw on the work of Charles Taylor, who has argued that full autonomy contains a moment of self-transcendence toward ‘‘horizons of significance,’’ which must ultimately refer to non-anthropocentric sources of value.44 On this alternative, the value of contingency derives from its protecting the autonomy of the offspring. In both cases, the concept of contingency relies on the idea of creation as a process that is both independent of human will, and in principle unknowable to us. A more promising alternative that embraces a post-metaphysical perspective is that the contingency of the beginning of a life is valuable because it protects the autonomy of the offspring. The conception of contingency at stake here is different. It is a condition of possibility of an agent to become fully autonomous that the beginning of his or her life was contingent in the sense of not having been at the disposal of another human being. With such a minimal sense of contingency in mind we may argue, against the liberal position, that the contingency of the beginning of a life may be understood as a primary good. The primary good of contingency 41

Ibid., p. 13.

42

Ibid., p. 79.

43

See Ludwig Siep, ‘‘The Value of Natural Contingency,’’ in Marcus Du¨well, Christoph RehmannSutter, and Dietmar Mieth, eds., The Contingent Nature of Life: Bioethics and the Limits of Human Existence (Dordrecht: Springer 2008).

44

Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (1991), p. 91.

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concerning a beginning that eludes human disposal should be respected to avoid jeopardizing the moral autonomy of the offspring. We can perhaps even maintain that contingency can be seen as what Rawls calls a main primary good, without which the acquisition of all other primary goods and the attainment of good life become respectively pointless or impossible. Taking contingency as a primary good is not susceptible to the same line of criticism that the liberal account faces, that while relying on an assumed preference for primary goods in the construction of principles of what is right, non-neutral, teleological dimensions are smuggled in. The enhancement traits proposed in moderately liberal accounts are not really primary goods, neutral with respect to particular conceptions of a good life and risk blocking the realization of particular ideas of a good life. In the case of contingency as a primary good, it must be said that it is not completely neutral either. However, it is safe to maintain that contingency as a primary good is at least a thinner notion that endangers the autonomy of the offspring to the least possible degree. This is why it is reasonable to employ such a primary good, which provides a normative backdrop for the impermissibility of genetic enhancement, (except to prevent disease). While the dilemmas of asymmetrical genetic intervention are not adequately captured within the traditional moral vocabulary of autonomy and individual rights, this need not support the supposed link between our anthropological self-understanding and morals, as Habermas suggests. Instead, we can expand our notion of autonomy to include the respect for the undisposability of future persons and the contingency of the beginning of a life as one of its enabling conditions. Additionally, the practice of protecting such contingency could be understood as a form of intergenerational recognition. Axel Honneth argues for a constitutive role of three forms of intersubjective recognition for the attainment of autonomy and the formation of personal identity. The three distinctive forms of self-relation are ideally achieved in three different categories of interaction. Self-confidence is achieved in primary affective relations. Self-respect is gained through the legal acknowledgment of our rights and moral capacity, and self-esteem emerges from an appreciated contribution to shaping a community.45 This account of recognition could be extended to encompass another form of recognition, the recognition of indisposability of the genetic makeup of future persons.

5 Concluding Remarks As emerging biotechnologies continue to advance toward the reality of enhancement technologies, they give rise to intoxicating feelings of human freedom finally free of the chains of what is naturally given and to disturbing feelings of moral vertigo. For the first time, we must settle whether we should intervene at the most primitive levels and employ genetic technologies to enhance human lives. Liberal theorists acknowledge that the dislocation of a boundary would challenge our moral system. Some of them argue that the solution must be found by invoking the concept 45

See Axel Honneth The Struggle for Recognition (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1995)

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of primary goods promoted by Rawls and by extending our existing egalitarian, liberal, moral principles that prioritize what is right. This strategy however, fails to meet its own neutrality-requirement. The restrictive view, as proposed by Habermas, is that dislocation of chance and choice not only challenges our moral system but exceeds its capacity. Such questions cannot be answered by relying on either conventional or new norms forged on the basis of universalist principles, because they touch on the fundamental normative self-understanding that our universalist moral principles rely on. However, while our self-understanding as moral persons is arguably conditioned by our self-understanding as members of a species, without further elaboration, the argument from species ethics fails to be convincing. The most plausible position is that while the dilemmas of asymmetrical genetic intervention are not adequately captured within the traditional moral vocabulary of autonomy and individual rights, this need not be because the challenge touches upon our anthropological self-understanding as Habermas suggests. We can expand our notion of autonomy to meet the challenge. Such an extended notion of autonomy should include the respect for the undisposability of future persons and the contingency of the beginning of a life as an enabling condition. The undisposability or contingency of the beginning of a life is a primary good that should be protected to avoid endangering the autonomy of the offspring. Additionally, undisposability can be understood as a form of intergenerational recognition and readily integrated in current theory of recognition.46

46 I would like to thank two anonymous referees and Thomas Magnell, the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Value Inquiry, for their useful comments.

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