Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 23:11:33 EST
Subject: Re: [HAB:] re: distinctions and risks in genomic technologies


 
In a message dated 11/11/2004 10:05:41 PM Eastern Standard Time,  
coherings-AT-yahoo.com writes:

In the  event of counseled choice for genetic
enhancement, JH presumes that "the  parents were only
looking to their own preferences, as if disposing  of
an object" (NYU draft, p.63), rather than, say,
thinking about what's  best for their child, i.e.,
enhancing their child’s capability and acting  as
child-centered parents. He *presumes* this because he
doesn't  consider other options, doesn't argue why this
one "looking" is the  situation. Another way of looking
at JH's situation, though, is that his  previous
subject-object argumentation [which I’ve covered at
length in  earlier postings of the past week] compels
his sense of the parents (which  is bogus) or compels
that he is concerned *only inasmuch as* the  parents
act egoistically. But the latter begs the question of
evaluating  the parents' intentions (probably good
parents vs. probably bad parents)  and begs the
liklihood that JH is confronting us with a key  problem
(that requires control by prohibitive law), rather
than  understanding how to create ethical conditions of
enhanced parenting and  how to prevent conditions of
unfairness. JH is working toward prohibitive  public
policy rather than preventive public policy. It's like
a  criminological approach to lack of education. It
echos a police state with  authoritarian citizens. Is
JH arguing with his own  adolescence?



Gary,  Habermas' comments that present the parent's egocentricity is  not his 
primary argument, in 'The Future of Human Nature' his argument  spans a 
deontological and an ethical perspective which dovetails with a  
temporalizing-historizing analysis and his theory of communicative action  in which the 
reciprocity between observer and participant, present  generation-future generation, 
and programmer-programmed person is taken into  consideration.  Your remark 
about adolescence is well-taken but Habrmas  does use this stage for a 
presenting-awareness of possible contestation of  either the parent's expectations, the 
geneticists, or even a so-called  democratic constitutional society's 
determinations.
 
When you say you have been covering Habermas' S-O arguments this past week,  
how are you able to disambiguate any constructions by the subject.  He  is not 
approaching this matter from a prohibitive perspective as is the  president, 
he is instead making a distinction between therapeutic interventions  that 
address extreme evils much as in addressing an epidemic from enhancements  which 
fail to consider the effects of eugenic inteventions on the programmed  
person's autonomy, freedom, and fate, and on the human communitiy's normative  and 
ethical self-understanding.
 
Fred Welfare


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