Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2001 23:12:02 -0800 (PST)
Subject: HAB: From Ethics to Jurisprudence ("l.e.", sec. V, 1st half)


ETHICALITY OF AUTHORSHIP CALLED TO ASPIRE
["Liberal Eugenics," section V; first paragraph of V is para. 67)

The above title may seem odd (even odder in yesterday's notice of
"Next Week...."). These posting titles are the paragraph titles I
made up during my 4th-or-so reading of JH's essay last month. This
one won't seem apt for a while below, but I finally decided to keep
it. But that's just the first rubric of the day; I'm responding to
over half of section V. 

-----------------------------------------------------

Genetic enhancement will happen. It'll happen within a healthcare
model of genetic counseling and services which work intimately with
family medicine, obstetrics and pediatrics. The character of good
parenting is the key to a happy drama of the gifted child, which has
little to do with being gifted and everything to do with how adults
generally--parents, physicians, teachers, counselors--let her grow
up, which is the case now (before availability of genetic services)
as much as it will be later. 

JH, of course, finds my "will be" (not mine, of course)
disconcerting, and appeals (a Kantian set-up) to "our moral feelings
in the idea..." (67); but it's a chimeric idea: "...the idea of
eugenic programming," which de-differentiates bioscience, genetic
counseling, genetic services, clinical medicine, good parenting and
education (broadly conceived) in one loaded, numinous phrase
(imported from bioethics, I know). 

We should work constructively with proper differentiations (staying
true to the discursive value of being true to the phenomenon). 

Recall that JH has stipulated that the issue is between parents and
child--parental intentions and the child's self-understanding. We
must presume that we're talking about real enhancement, not apparent
enhancement. This is not a matter of designing to have a gifted child
who turns out not to be gifted. This is a matter of intended
giftedness rather than accidental giftedness--or gifted longevity, in
my example. I think we can stipulate that anyone would prefer to be
gifted than otherwise; and to have very long life expectancy, than
otherwise. So the burden of JH's argument is not prima facie on
biomedicine (or child-centered parents); rather JH's reading of the
likely reality is the issue. Does anyone disagree that intentional
gifted longevity is a universalizable value? Of *course* a child
would welcome gifted longevity, *because* it's in *our* nature to
prefer this. In the following, 'giftedness' stands for "intentional
gifted longevity," and I'm referring to this instead of JH's  vague
rubric of 'genetic enhancement' (which, of course, belongs to the
bioethics literature itself) 

Though JH rightly rejects a justification of giftedness by others who
argue that the environment of growing up (nurture) dissolves the
causal specificity of the gift (60), JH apparently forgets ontogeny
altogether when he presumes a "fixing [of] properties, dispositions
and skills as well as... determining the behavior of the future
person,..."(67). 

What gift is he talking about? Evidently something bionic. He
objectivizes the gift in an alienated "body", but the topic is
*genetic* enhancement-- genetic *enhancement*-- which is ONLY
comprehensible in terms of some giftedness, and giftedness is
*constitutive* of self-understanding holistically, not like an
appendage to one's body (or self-objectification). 

Though JH grants that knowing about her gift "would take place in the
mind" (67), he doesn't apparently appreciate that, most likely, the
giftedness constitutes the self-understanding that may keep its
genealogy in mind. The gifted person is gifted in self-understanding
all along--NOT especially GIFTED understanding (though probably that,
too), rather: BEING the giftedness, not basically just *having* it.
Knowing would take place in self-understanding, which has ALL ALONG
included a sense of "me" which is self-representational (yesterday's
posting). It's not especially in knowing the gift that "awareness
would shift... from the performative attitude...to the observer
perspective" (67), because this I/me difference is inherent to
identity formation all along. 

JH poses that the relevant observer perspective is that "which
governed the intervention" (67), which would be the parents' choice
to have a gifted child. But the significance of this choice is
integrated into the entire integrity of the child's sense of
self-integration throughout identity formation. To understand the
parents' stance would be to "read" them (the adults *in* their
original position as parents) through the identity that she is--the
self-identifical life history that she expresses and reflects. The
sense of *agency* and *active self* is integral to the life made, and
thus the self-understanding of her life. The potential for agency and
active self that is provided by the gift is *actualized* in the
holism of self-understanding and WON'T "be superceded...in
objectivating self-perception" (67) because self-representation CAN'T
supercede self-identification; the two are essential complements of
self-understanding. 

Indeed, one may fall into objectivating self-perception, but this is
a NORMAL fall in adolescence; being gifted doesn't especially promote
this (If anything, being gifted avoids chronic falling). "[T]he
perspective of being something made" is naturally subordinated to the
perspective of being *someone* making a life. One would have to
deliberately alienate the child from herself, in order to make her
feel like some thing. Knowing "I'm" intentionally gifted won't
alienate me. Knowing that my parents caused me to be gifted won't
"confront[] us on an existential level, so to speak, with the
expectation that we subordinate our 'being a body' to our 'having a
body'." (67). 

So, yes, Jürgen, "we should...remain skeptical about [your] imaginary
dramatization of anticipated facts....'so what'?" (68). IT's NOT "the
subjugation of our [?] body and our life to bio-technology" (68).

So, let's focus on the moral of this story (69). Up to now, you've
anticipated an ethics of the species which sustains a moral autonomy
that is more than ensurance of human rights (earlier posting), but
this has become an unthematized de-differentiation of the moral and
the ethical, via such slipped-in, unexplicated phrases as "moral
self-understanding," "moral feeling," and now "moral convictions":
"Moral convictions and norms are, as I said, situated in forms of
life" (69). No, you said that *ethical* convictions and norms are
situated in forms of life, but your preferred focus on that "which is
reproduced through the members' communicative actions" (69) would
imply a focus on the horizontal interpersonality of social
normativity rather than the holistic intersubjectivity of ethical
normativity. 

Ethical life is the basis of social life. Ethical life provides the
ontogenesis, the home, and the neighborhood of social life. Ethical
life is the land in which intimacy, kindredness, solidarity, and
civility may really live in common or dwell. 

It is not basically the case that "individuation is achieved through
the socializing medium of dense linguistic communication,..." (69).
The enactive (constructivist) basis of human development is
primordially embodied mentality, not sociality. Individuation is
achieved primarily through its being (not "medium of") dense
intelligence, which is *also* linguistic, but whose cognitive nature
is analogical, prototypical, and conceptual in spatio-temporal
semiotic modes of visual, aural, kinesthetic/proprioceptive, logical,
self-identical, personal, and linguistic intelligence (Robert
Sternberg, _Metaphors of Mind: conceptions of the nature of
intelligence_, Cambridge UP, 1990, especially chapter 11, which
integrates Howard Gardner's clinically-based theory of "multiple
intelligences" with Robert Sternberg's empirically-based triarchic
theory of "mental self-government"; also: Howard Gardner,
_Intelligence Re-Framed: multiple intelligences for the 21st
century_, Basic Books, 1999). 

Of course, "the integrity of individuals" generally includes "the
respect underlying their dealings with one another" (69), as a matter
of autonomous life ("..their dealings..."), but basically
(intimately, kindredly), this integrity is not "particularly
dependent on" respectful dealings, since one's integrity emerges from
an inter/intra-subjectivity of ontogeny that is not basically about
interpersonal "dealings with one another" and is intra-subjective as
much as it is intersubjective (Daniel Stern, _The Interpersonal World
of the Infant_, Basic Books, 2000; Stern understands 'interpersonal'
as an intimately intersubjective notion, emergent from an
"emergent"--> "core"--> "subjective"--> "verbal" ontogeny of
self/personhood). But increasingly, self-understanding is
intersubjective within a self-identical intra-worldliness (in accord
with the I/me self-personal holism of self-understanding and
multi-modality of cognition).  Authentic self-understanding is being
(self) in the world (personally), not a subject-centered autonomy at
risk of losing control unless it legislates itself categorically.

A Kantian intuition of the moral is stretched ambivalently and
implausibly (if not confusedly) between ethical life and a
self-centered legislative ambition to make law autonomously. 

In ethical life, we of course care about others--sometimes deeply
(with our children, we care unconditionally)-- but it would be
improper to always regard others as students/children of a
teacherly/parental stance, i.e., ""always at the same time as an end
in himself'" (69), because *we* have ends together that prevail over
our separate life authorships, and each of us does have a life apart
from others. We do NOT live always at the same time in the stance of
legislative educators. There's no need for this in our world
(contrary to a monarchal subject seeking to influence a court). 

Even in conflict, a *shared* ground of life (if not a collaborative
engagement) prevails over conceptions of each other's individual
authorship. We know Kant's point; it's a natural feature of good
lives, based in the healthy ontogeny of families. The issue is: Did
Kant provide insight into this basis? Yes, relative to 18th century
European life. *Does* Kant still provide insight into the basis of
care, that brings you back to him again and again (apart from
re-affirming Germany's native basis for its own constitutionality)?
No, I think harping on Kant just re-produces the problems of
subject-centered reason. 

I agree that "...in cases of conflict, the persons involved are to go
on interacting in an attitude of communicative action. They are to
attune themselves, from the participant perspective of a first
person, to the other as a second person, with the intention of
reaching an understanding with him..." (69), but the interpersonal
stance of dialogue roles on shared ground is not the same as an
intersubjectivity of selves living together. 

Conflict between parties in a project is not the same as conflict
between partners or family members or intimates. The civil setting of
conflict searches for solidarity; but does solidarity search for
kindredness? Kindredness search for intimacy? These differences must
be respected, due to the real nature of being with others in the
actual world of differences: familial, cohort, partnership, and
citizenry. It is specious to de-differentiate them. 

You occlude this issue by confronting the reader with the issue (now
clearly chimeric, given earlier discussion--I hope!) of "reifying and
instrumentalizing" the other. But this issue of communicative vs.
strategic action is quite secondary to issues internal to
communicative ethics, involving vital differences in kinds of
constructive relations (that also conflict).

Sometimes, you are very much thinking internal to communicative
ethics,  since the critically relevant "range for her possible
responding" in conflict is set by "[t]he 'self' of this end in
itself...primarily expressed in the authorship of a life" where
"[e]verybody...is the source of authentic aspirations" (69). 

But you narratively/ rhetorically slide between conditions of
interpersonal life (more or less public life) and intersubjective
life (more or less private life), as if it's all the same--one big
moral feeling, etc. You confront us with an ambivalence of the moral
and the ethical that apparently IS your specieal ethic. 

But I don't want to claim that the ethical and the moral are proxies
for a natural distinction between intersubjective and interpersonal
life, since self and personal understanding are not clearly separated
in  authentically-based (self-identical) interpersonal (genuine)
dailiness. They are conceptually distinct and reflectively
distinguishable for self-understanding. Rather, I've suspected all
along that the moral dissolves in the difference between ethical life
and governmental formation of protocols and policies. I just wonder
what remains insistantly moral for you, apart from this; and I see
the moral migrating, apparently for rhetorical purposes that are
philosophically untenable. 

Intra-/inter-subjective/-personal differences belong to ethical life;
I don't know what else is distinctly moral. Systemizations of
interpersonal norms are relevant to the formation of governmental
protocols and policies. What else is there besides pragmatic
generalization of parts of ethical life, in the "thin" interest of
civil life and interactive solidarities (which become competing
political interest positions) that is called moral? Now apparently
*collapsing* a difference (moral vs. ethical) that you generally have
insisted on (wisely: ethics vs governing), when it suits you, as if
"moral feeling," etc. speaks for a singular ethical-moral sense is
not philosophically constructive.

------------------------------------------------------
GIVING UP HUMANISTIC AUTHORSHIP FOR GENERALIZED HUMANITY? (70)

JH: "The categorical imperative requires every single person to give
up the perspective of a first person in order to join an
inter-subjectively shared "we"-perspective which enables all of them
together to attain value orientations which can be generalized."

When? Where? We don't need this requirement in ethical life. Rather,
the intersubjective basis of care entails that, for interpersonal
projects, we integrate the first person perspective of each with the
interpersonal interests of others, not for generalization, but for
*us* who identify with each other, usually in our shared
organizational roles, but also maybe more closely, by way of
solidarities and relations of kindredness. The presumptuous duty to
act for generalization never arises in ethical life; we grant others'
capacity to form their own agreements (isomorphic with identifying
with each other's life-based integrity); we don't legislate for
strangers (except as legislators, another matter--an institutional
matter). Our common agreements our timeline for revision and
re-construction of the project (in light of reconsidered values,
purposes, goals, policies, and protocols--projective understanding,
this might be). Exemplarity of the agreement may serve as a model for
others, and so our project design might get picked up more generally.
Great! But there's no categorical imperative at work to legislate for
everyone. We're not acting for the universe; we're acting in
localities for our common ground or representing the commons as best
our conscience provides (not failing to understand the emergent telos
of our constituents, when that's relevant). You can't just pretend
there's no vast difference between participatory life and systemized
government. Nonetheless, ethical life provides a sufficient
conceptual basis for both *very* different kinds of representation. 

JH: "Kant’s 'formula of ends' already provides the bridge to the
'formula of laws'." 

GD: See, this is the matter: Getting a bridge to legislation. But why
here, why now? Your present discussion--the essay--is nowhere near
being in a place to justifiably turn governmental. 

JH: "The idea that valid norms must be of a kind that can be
generally accepted..."

GD: Nevertheless participating in your governmental venue.....But
valid norms *are* just the range of accepted regulation; the idea of
there being a kind of substantive generality beyond the norms is
irrelevant to those norms (if you grant, as you do elsewhere, that
the variable procedures of norm formation--that vary among
organizations--are not substantive norms or meta-norms implied by
specific norms); generalizability principles beyond the range of
given norms are not entailed by those norms. The idea is, I think,
that *proposed* regulatives don't become norms over anyone other than
those who accept them as such, either overtly (in participatory
processes) or by proxy (growing up in a given social world of
facticity or accepting the results of institutionalized procedures).
But "universe" of discourse here is a very ordinary notion of range
of defined applicability. 

JH: "The idea...is suggested by the remarkable provision enjoining us
to respect 'humanity' in every single person by treating her as an
end in itself."

But that sense of humanity originates in intersubjective life, not as
some regularive concept; and it doesn't arise for government at all,
because government is relative to constitutional life (initiating a
regional history that is political), not humanity as such. Writing
constitutions is another matter, but we're talking about biomedical
services within constituted societies (or something organizationally
defined). 

In the lifeworld, respecting the humanity in each other is just so
preliminary, so minimalist--so unlike the appreciation for each other
as identities (whatever your unknown self-identical ends are) in
interpersonal life. 

Well, you might say, this is altogether what Kant meant! 

No, Kant lacked the sense of embodied intersubjectivity, lifeworld
interpersonality, and life-authorial self-identification that is most
definitive of our humanity, and he lacked the sense of procedural
institutionalization that *distances* personal life, thank goodness,
from the systemization of civic ends. 

JH: "The concept of humanity obliges us to take up the
'we-perspective from which we perceive one another...

No, the intersubjectvity of embodied life appeals to us *as* the
basis for an interpersonal we-perspective...

JH: ."..as members of an inclusive community no person is excluded
from."

That's a nice idea--but largely an empty idea. Community is a local
phenomenon that is abstracted very thinly when it's conceived to be
inclusive of everyone. 

What is the character of a community that *does* include everyone? A
cultural pluralism of modern life is more fruitful *without* an
encompassing Concept, other than a sense of the hybriding pluralism
(which is evolutionary itself, held stable by no one). The so-called
global community is a discursive concept variably advocated, very
interestingly, but this is part of the cultural pluralism.
Cosmopolity? What, beyond a UN that works and the lovely anarchy of
global media, do you want? A LOT, I'm sure. So, lead the global
conversation (or try to) in the planetary commons. Does global
culture need a singular species of ethic? You or I may have proposals
that we find appealing and want to advocate in the commons. But the
evolutionary variabilities of cultures are not about to appreciate
universalistic discourses. Perhaps compelling cases for an ethics of
the species can flourish. So, we have *our* community of
"universalism" claiming universalizability that may flourish. But the
"bridge" from community life to discursive community is more like an
evolution, and hardly a matter of law. 

-------------------------------------------------------
TRANSPOSE LOCAL CONFLICT INTO GLOBAL TERMS AND GLOBALIZE ONE'S
GENERALIZED HUMANITY? (71) 

To get out of conflict, you would have us "subject our own will to
the very maxims which everybody may want to see as a universal law,"
but in *real* conflict, taking place on common ground (presumably
local or regional), in a pluralistically evolving world, there is *no
need* to see anything as a universal law. There are no final
legislations. The constitution can be amended. The next government
can amend and revoke. The descendents will live in a world we may not
imagine, let alone anticipate.  

It's not the case that "every time a dissensus over underlying value
orientations arises....[it's] a matter in need of regulation," and
when there *is* the need, vital differences should be respected
between matters of local life (whose norms may remain fluid among
persons interacting regularly and richly) and matters of law (whose
"norms" are statutory, requiring strict procedures of revision). The
Kantian phrasing isn't very informative for the complex variability
of the lifeworld. 

JH: ". On the one hand, there is the nature of the person 'being an
end in itself' who as an irreplaceble individual is supposed to be
capable of leading a life of his own;...."

But this abstractly occludes (and violates) the difference between
the interpersonal boundaries of public life and the intersubjectivity
of self-understanding in private life. My abstract capability is not
secured by your recognition in our interpersonal settings; it's
secured by the intersubjectivity of my life history, in which I'm not
a basically an abstract person with capabilities. 

JH"... on the other hand, there is the equal respect which every
person in his quality as a person is entitled to."

But this matter of entitlement is a matter of law, based in
constitutional values arising from ethical life (whose possibly
specieal basis of self-understanding hasn't been addressed by your
discussion). The entitlement has no force apart from its
constitutionality, and the constitutionality is a pragmatic
systemization of ethical life (so far unfounded). There is no
"universality of moral norms" apart from ethical life (whose
anthropological depth can't be simply presumed to be a formal
universality) which *requires* no recognition of universality, other
than the provincial universe of its lifeworlds--which may be
reflectively deep and even ecumenically universalist; but such would
arise from an ethic of the species, based in self-understanding, not
an autonomous realm of law dressed as the moral.

JH: "...the universality of moral norms ensuring equal treatment for
all cannot be an abstract one; ..."

But it is.

JH: "...it has to be sensitive to the individual situations and
life-projects of every single person."

And what happens when you *do* that? There is no substantive
universality of being sensitive across the locality of culturally
variable lifeworlds other than what's available to
intersubjectively-based self-understanding in actually interpersonal
venues. The universality available is a theorization of ethical
self-understanding of a species that is kaleidoscopically evolving. 

---------------------------------------------
JURISPRUDENCE ACROSS CULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES: PROTECTING & ENSURING
AUTHENTIC FREEDOM *RELATIVE TO* FAIRLY SENSITIVE GLOBAL STANDARDS
(72)

So, we have "a concept of morality where individuation and
generalization interpenetrate."

Interpenetrate?

JH: "The authority of the first person, as expressed ...in the
authorship [of] one’s own life-conduct, must not be violated even by
the self-legislation of the moral community."

Agreed, but there is no "moral community" apart from the governmental
system that ensures the privacy of the person. The self-legislation
of the community IS its political system. The *substantive* meaning
of the person's life isn't recognized by ensurance of privacy; that
meaning belongs to the intersubjectivity of ethical life. The moral
seems to be vaporware. 

To say that "[m]oral life will ensure the freedom of the individual
to lead his own life only if the application of generalized norms
does not unreasonably lace in the scope for choosing and developing
one’s life project...." says no more than: Ethical life will thrive
only if the law is not overbearing. The moral is either empty, apart
from the meaning it gets from ethical life, or it's a jurisprudential
stance, in which case we should treat it as such (within overtly
jurisprudential discourse). 

The "very universality of valid norms" fails to capture the vital
difference between (1) plural "universes" of ethical lifeworlds *as*
cultural regions and (2) plural ranges and levels of
constitutionality *across* geographical regions.

A "...non-assimilative, non-coercive intersubjective commonality"
belongs to local life; it's not a matter that generalized
perspectives can ensure (beyond abstract protections of law). Indeed,
*ethical* life "gets expressed in view of the whole range of a
reasonable variety of interests and interpretive perspectives"
*sometimes*; but living "in view of the whole range" is just a
generalized stance within the whole range of life-centered horizons
(not generally interested in the whole range of views), a range which
isn't grasped by a general notion of the whole--and *who* says the
variety has to be "reasonable"? In fact, the plurality of cultural
life is not instantiated from some notion of what's reasonable.
Reasonability is a dimension *of* cultural evolution.  "...[N]either
leveling out nor suppressing nor marginalizing nor excluding the
voices of the others – the strangers, the dissidents and the
powerless" is skeletal to an evolutionary body that has a mind of its
own. 

---------------------------------------------
DISCOURSE: APPROPRIATING COMPLEX INTEGRATION (DOMAIN) WITH ALL FREE
INDIVIDUALITIES (RANGE) [73]. 

Nonetheless, the embodied mind of cultural pluralism needs its
skeleton of reasonability. However, there's nothing especially
*moral* about reason; reason pertains to all domains of validity.
"...[T]he person expressing a moral judgment" relative to what you
characterize (73) is actually expressing a judgment general to
normative reason. Any sense of the moral comes from the sense of the
normative, not conversely; and normativity as such pertains to
life-historical orientation (not generalizable at all) as well as
organized life (which is proto-legal and formally legislative),  

To say that "...her own capacity of being herself is as important for
the person engaging in moral action as the fact that the other is
being herself" is just to emptily substitute 'moral' for 'ethical',
because the only venue in which this reciprocity of importance is
evaluable is within interpersonal life, upon which procedural
jurisdiction (and *nothing else* between ethical life and government)
is dependent. 

Yes, "in the 'yes' or 'no' of participants in discourse, the
spontaneous self- and world-understanding of individuals who are
irreplaceable...find[s] its appropriate expression."  This is the
ethic of discourse based in interpersonal life, yet you go further to
indicate that self/world understanding "must find" approrpiate
expression. But this "must" has no basis, no force beyond avowals
that belong to the participants themselves, while the participants
themselves work with a broader sensibility, including *desires* to
find appropriate expression, *hopes* to find appropriate expression,
and appreciation that appropriate expressions is NOT something that
can be prescriptive.


Next: The remainder of section V, paragraphs 74-79.



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