Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2001 13:09:09 +0200
Subject: Re: HAB: Notes of an ethical realist ("l.e.", 56-61)


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Dear Gary,
I am reading your comments and criticisms on JH's "Liberal Eugenics".
Could you please forward the article itself in english so that I will be
able to read it and apprecaite your points more comprehensively?
bahattin

Gary E Davis wrote:

> 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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