File spoon-archives/habermas.archive/habermas_2001/habermas.0111, message 7


Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2001 00:36:54 -0800 (PST)
From: Gary E Davis <gedavis1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: HAB: Notes of an ethical realist ("l.e.", 56-61)


EMBODIMENT (BEING) VS. BODY (CONCEPT), part 1 of 2
["liberal eugenics," section IV, paragraphs 56-61 (1st para. of IV is
#52)

JH: "Bio-technological intervention, in replacing clinical treatment,
intercepts [his earlier indicated] 'correspondence' with other living
beings" (56). 

Yes, given that there's "replacing". But clinical services are
presently the gatekeeper to genetic counseling, and there's no
evidence of tendencies to the contrary--certainly no evidence in JH's
discussion. Replacement is chimeric. 

Furthermore, it's counter-productive (if not dangerous, relative to
clinically-relevant issues) to talk vaguely of "bio-technological"
activity. Persons close to issues of genetic counseling aren't
oriented by generalist attitudes toward "bio-technology". JH is
interested in a seque to Hans Jonas (writing in 1985), but what will
this accomplish, relative to guiding the thinking of clinical
practitioners? Isn't attributions of "'...a new determinant...
collaborative with the auto-activity of active material'" (Jonas)
merely a personification of biological processes?

JH's "correspondence"--which he will explicate like a
co-respondence--is based *really* in intersubjectively-based
processes of empathy, now transposed (albeit nobly!) to biological
processes. But ascribing "activity" to embryonic life easily confuses
the difference between *functionality* of processes (biological) and
*intentionality* of functions (mental) (see _Norms of Nature_, Paul
S. Davies, MIT Press, 2001). What biochemical processes "do" is not
*doing* anything at all.  

Well-disseminated constructivist ethics toward nature--biophilia,
ecopsychology (Deep Ecology)--are a wonderful creations, but they all
show how (and that) what we *grant* to nature belongs to *our*
constructivist bond with nature, not to the biological processes
themselves. 

Intelligence of the *Earth* (planet), albeit intelligence *of* the
Earth (evolved), is nontheless *intelligence* of the Earth
(construct, creation). INDEED, there is "self-referentiality" (JH,
56) here, but it is *not* "specific" at the generalist level of JH's
presentation, since "complex self-regulated process" applies to the
entire applied scientific enterprise, which can't be modeled
naturalistically. 

Let's *do* get specific, but let's leave evaluative overtones about
"irreversibility of intervention" to the contexts in which they are 
defined and considered. Sure, "'To 'produce', here, means to commit
something to the stream of evolution" (56), very, very generally
speaking--across time--but "the producer himself" is no more specific
than a widely distributed community (while being generally an
emergent characteristic of evolution itself, only emblemized by
discursive constructions like "the producer himself"), NOT merely
"carried along" but evolving (active verb). 

We are SO far from "ruthless...intrusion" becoming "bondage of the
living to the dead" (57). I agree, then, with JH that the "species as
a collective singular" (58) doesn't belong to what he calls "liberal
varieties of eugenics," but why is this? Due to prohibitive "moral
reasons...solidly rooted in the principles that underly our
constitution and jurisdiction" (58)? What principles? Is this the
ethics of the species that sustains moral autonomy? The ethics-S
sustains morality (earlier discussion) but underlies the constitution
(which, I thought, was supposed to be based on morality)? Or is it
that morality is a proxy for law, and ethics-S is the hermeneutic
that secures this? The ambivalence of "morality" between ethics-S and
law is definite (yet indeterminate).

I don't want to play fiction against fiction about what liberal
eugenics is supposed to become. We need a more specific sense of what
applied genomics is about, what genetic counseling involves, and what
specific enhancement is being considered, in order to make practical
sense (and critical sense) of the technical issues. Understanding
this as vague "genetic manipulation" (61) modeled on "bricolage" (56)
is not constructive (not practically critical). JH thinks that "the
distinction between clinical action and technical fabrication" (61)
is established ("...as we have seen...") via the differentiation of
subjective and objective, but as we have seen, this isn't the case,
because the distinction is complexly entwined with the
intersubjectivity of both clinical practice and technical means, as
well as background attitudes toward personification of biological
processes that don't derive from nature itself (except that the
notion of *nature* is a human construction in the first place--a
creature of background attitudes deriving from
religio-metaphysicalist reflections). Ascriptions about "the quasi
subjective nature of [the] embryo" (61) are like fundamentalist
("pro-Life") ascriptions of the child at conception: entwined with
worldview, in JH's case a personified subject-object dualism that
occludes more than it clarifies, resulting in a false dichotomy
between fictive "intervening person" (objectivist genetic service)
and a projected subjectivity or "self-perception of the person
concerned. Ojectivism vs. subjectivity.

But how *does* one differentiate this from objectivity vs.
subjectivism? In other words, how does one distinguish plausible
*reality* of genetic services from subjectivist criticism (chimeras)?
How does one come to recognize subjectivist occlusion of
*intersubjectivity*, as the latter has its part in the private
constitution of the reality of clinical services and the capacity of
future parents to authentically care about their prospective child?


Next: EMBODIMENT (BEING) VS. BODY (CONCEPT), part 2 of 2
[remainder of section IV]

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