Subject: HAB: liberal eugenics
Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2001 21:31:30 -0500


Seems clear Habermas (along with all the rest of us,  excepting, i guess,
some nietzscheans/nazis) is morally repelled by the brave new world of
liberal eugenics.  And further, the rubicon having been crossed many times
already (with in vitro fertilization and embryo selection), seems he sees
virtually no possibility now of interposing a moral decision before the
socio-economic steam-roller, the capital-technology combine, impelling it.
So eugenics imminently threatens de-personating (instrumentalization,
cannibalization, loss of enchantment,  inner-nature, identity, autonomy,
dignity) the species in a way heretofore unapproached by technology.

His pessimism is relieved only by a kinda wistful pis aller on the species'
capacity for moral auto-poiesis. That perhaps, Woman can, beginning from
Kant's categorically moral  autotelic constitution of human dasein, create a
new, universal-secular, ethos of the species. That is, it appears, only by
way of a moral-cultural rump, not a society; like the monks devotedly
tending the lamp of civilization thru the dark ages.

...but, don't it seem the sub-text here is still after all not Reason, but,
Traditon?...that the text begs a continuation of Aristotle-St. Paul & co,
all the old forms of the auto-poetic cultural heritance of the West, not a
discarding?...and the q is still: how can you even think "ethical" without a
tradition/history? ...indeed, the case of the brave new dark age, how can a
person be a person?



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