Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2001 21:30:18 -0800 (PST)
Subject: HAB: To What End? ("l.e.", broad brush closure, i think...)




As your essay reaches its end, the ethics of the species has been
made no clearer, but has also become "the ethical self-understanding
of the species" (98) and "its communicatively structured form of
life" (99). Extrapolating from the alarm aroused by imagining
"dissonant cases" (81) of the gifted who can't reverse their supposed
unhappiness, you direct attention to future generations (91), in an
isomorphism of parent-to-child and Present-to-Future. But the case
for pre-emptive regulation, in duty of care for descendents, is no
stronger than the case for the cogency of anticipated cases of
irresponsible parental care for their child's future. Apparently, you
would write regulations without any foundation in case law. 

In any event, your moral autonomy is as good as its ethics of the
species, and that ethics must (due to the nature of the species) be
founded on understanding our species' nature (which, I think, has far
more disposition toward care, learnability, and responsibility than
you imply--thus more resources than you employ). Our species is
inherently individuative, which increasingly shows in the
youth-generational individuality, each of which was supposed to
succumb to carelessness, each of which leaves its parents at risk of
a future shock the children don't feel. 

Jürgen, you underestimate the children, while none of us can 
credibly anticipate the capacities of future generations to manage
their own options (let alone legislate for them preventively).
Nonetheless, you make the skeptic's case that needs to be made
(though it seems to play to the cynics' preferences), but it's based
on a sense of us that's essentially conventional, rather than
post-conventional. While conventional life may require regulation,
the moral sense guiding policy-formative duty should be based on an
ethics of the species that can see the difference between
conventional and post-conventional thinking--both on the part of
imaginary parents and imaginary children (especially gifted ones). 

Post-conventional thinking is based in the capacities and potentials
of individuating and individuated self-understanding, which are
active even in infancy (though commonly dulled by crude
parenting--maybe the *heart* of the applied-genomics matter after
all!). The ethics of the species includes this focus on human being
unto itself NOT as a triumph of willed humanity that wills its reach
into law, but as a reality of infant, child, and adolescent nature
that, through health care services and education, draws on families'
potential for sustaining a deeply ethical life, as if drawing the
psychocultural genome in our various cultural species--through
discourse!, alas, and its weave through wherever. 

Obviously, we need our world to not foster "genetic fixation" (82),
and we need this for the sake of descendents we imagine, like memes
of a continuing genesis that we write (that will meet them like a
fait accompli of history we hope they won't need to undo). 

Where *do* we really lose the option of a "revisionary learning
process"? Is it just those first few enhanced ones that don't yet
grow up in a world of gifted ancestors, providing precendent
(guidance, confidence)? There *will* be errors, as humans will be
humans (and many in authority aren't notably bright). Maybe that's
the only problem: the early generations in an acceleration of
self-governing evolution. I *know* it's fantastically more
complicated than this. But whose got the time to read? We need direct
guidance, more than critical theory. But this is democracy: deferral
of decision authority to the over-worked cohorts. Maybe we just lack
an authentic aristocracy. Theorize *that*. 

No one knows. But it's clear that the discourse has to continue in
terms of the beings we are (being moving targets in the evolution we
foster), rather than a reductionistic portrait of our interests
(e.g., not distinguishing an enhancement of capacities, which
*promotes* revisionary learnability, and an enhancement of fixed
traits). The discourse has to find the insight to see beyond a no-win
political scenario where "consensus required would be either too
strong or too weak" (89). The discourse should be oriented by
constructivism about how to make applied genomics go well (and avoid
Huxleyan absurdities), rather than weave long scenarios based on
chimeras that kindles reactionism. The discourse should outgrow a
willful (" That we shall..." [102]) sense of "moral persons" that is
diffusely "embedded in the stabilizing context of an ethics of the
species" (90) that still lacks a stable basis (assimilating
individation to socialization, etc.)

Ending abruptly (as life itself tends to do)


So long,


Gary

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