The Future of Human Nature E-Book

Jürgen Habermas

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 208

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Recent developments in biotechnology and genetic research are raising complex ethical questions concerning the legitimate scope and limits of genetic intervention. As we begin to contemplate the possibility of intervening in the human genome to prevent diseases, we cannot help but feel that the human species might soon be able to take its biological evolution in its own hands. 'Playing God' is the metaphor commonly used for this self-transformation of the species, which, it seems, might soon be within our grasp. In this important new book, Jürgen Habermas - the most influential philosopher and social thinker in Germany today - takes up the question of genetic engineering and its ethical implications and subjects it to careful philosophical scrutiny. His analysis is guided by the view that genetic manipulation is bound up with the identity and self-understanding of the species. We cannot rule out the possibility that knowledge of one's own hereditary factors may prove to be restrictive for the choice of an individual's way of life and may undermine the symmetrical relations between free and equal human beings. In the concluding chapter - which was delivered as a lecture on receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for 2001 - Habermas broadens the discussion to examine the tension between science and religion in the modern world, a tension which exploded, with such tragic violence, on September 11th.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Publisher's Note

Foreword

Are There Postmetaphysical Answers to the Question: What is the “Good Life”?

I

II

III

Notes

The Debate on the Ethical Self-Understanding of the Species

I    Moralizing human nature?

II    Human dignity versus the dignity of human life

III    The embedding of morality inan ethics of the species

IV    The grown and the made

V    Natality, the capacity of being oneself, and the ban on instrumentalization

VI    The moral limits of eugenics

VII    Setting the pace for a self-instrumentalization of the species?

Notes

Postscript (January 2002)

Notes

Faith and Knowledge

Secularization in postsecular society

Science as an agent of informed common sense

Democratic common sense and religion

Dispute over a heritage: philosophy versus religion

The example of genetic engineering

Notes

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start Reading

CHAPTER 1

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Copyright © this translation Polity Press 2003

Chapter 1 was first published as “Begründete Enthaltsamkeit. Gibt es postmetaphysische Antworten auf die Frage nach dem ‘richtigen Leben’?” in Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur. Auf dem Weg zu einer liberalen Eugenik?, © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001. Chapter 2 was first published as “Auf dem Weg zu einer liberalen Eugenik? Der Streit um das ethische Selbstverständnis der Gattung” in Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur. Auf dem Weg zu einer liberalen Eugenik?, © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001. Chapter 3 was first published as “Glauben und Wissen” in Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels 2001, © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001.

First published in 2003 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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ISBN 0-7456-2986-5

ISBN 0-7456-2987-3 (pb) only available in the UK

ISBN 978-0-7456-9411-5 (epub)

ISBN 978-0-7456-9318-7 (mobi)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and has been applied for from the Library of Congress.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

Publisher's Note

Chapter 1 was translated by William Rehg. The foreword and the postscript to chapter 2 were translated by Max Pensky. The main body of chapters 2 and 3 was translated by Hella Beister and Max Pensky. For the German origins of these chapters, please see details on the copyright page.

Foreword

On the occasion of receiving the Dr Margrit Egnér Prize for the year 2000, I delivered a lecture on September 9 of that year at the University of Zurich that served as the basis for the first of the texts reproduced here. I proceed on the basis of a distinction between a Kantian theory of justice and a Kierkegaardian ethics of subjectivity, and defend the restraint that postmetaphysical thinking exercises regarding binding positions on substantive questions of the good or the un-misspent life. This is the contrasting background for an opposing question that arises in light of the debates touched off by genetic technology: Can philosophy tolerate this same restraint in questions of a species ethics as well?

The main text, an expanded version of the Christian Wolf Lecture given at Marburg University on June 28, 2001, is an entrance into this debate that does not relinquish the premises of postmetaphysical thinking. So far, this debate over genetic research and technology has circled around the question of the moral status of prepersonal human life without results. I therefore adopt the perspective of a future present, from which we might someday perhaps look back on currently controversial practices as the first steps toward a liberal eugenics regulated by supply and demand. Embryonic research and preimplantation genetic diagnosis excite strong emo-tions above all because they exemplify a danger that is bound to the metaphor of “human breeding.” Not without reason, we worry over the possible emergence of a thick intergenerational web of actions for which no one can be called to account, because it one-sidedly cuts vertically through the contemporary network of interactions. Therapeutic goals, by contrast, on which all genetic technological procedures ought to be based, draw narrow boundaries for each and every intervention. From the therapeutic perspective, one must assume an attitude toward a second person whose consent has to be taken into account.

The postscript to the main text, written at year's end, responds to objections less as a revision than as a clarification of my original intentions.

The third text is based on a speech I delivered on October 14, 2001, on the occasion of my reception of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. It takes up a question that has gained new relevance in the wake of September 11: What does an ongoing “secularization” within already secularized societies demand of the citizens of a democratic constitutional state, that is, from the faithful and the unfaithful alike?

Starnberg, December 31, 2001

Are There Postmetaphysical Answers to the Question: What is the “Good Life”?

In the novel Stiller Max Frisch has Stiller, the public prosecutor, ask: “What does a human being do with the time he has to live? I was hardly fully aware of the question; it was simply an irritation.” Frisch poses the question in the indicative mood. In their self-concern, reflective readers give the question an ethical turn: “What should I do with the time I have to live?” For long enough philosophers believed that they could give suitable advice in reply. But today, in our postmetaphysical age, philosophy no longer pretends to have answers to questions regarding the personal, or even the collective, conduct of life. Theodor Adorno's begins with a melancholy refrain of Nietzsche's “joyful science” – by admitting this inability: “The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy …: the teaching of the good life.” But ethics has now regressed, as Adorno believed, and become the “melancholy science,” because it allows, at best, only scattered, aphoristic “reflections from damaged life.”