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] __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Find a job, post your resume. http://careers.yahoo.com --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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