Habermas’s Critique Of Liberal Eugenics

Under the banner of neoliberalism,liberal eugenicists attempt to distinguish liberal eugenics from Nazi eugenics,about which Habermas raises serious doubts in Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natu:auf dem Weg zu einer liberal Eugenik? He argues that by using biological technology to interfere with the fusion of the parents’ sets of chromosomes,we would affect future persons’ capacity of being oneself,thereby creating an irreversible unsymmetrical relationship,and ultimately undermine the ethical self-understanding of human species based on the intuitive distinction between the grown and the made.The originality of Habermas’ argument is that human nature is construed not as a fixed essence,but as a specie’s mode of being-able-to-be-oneself.However,there are also disadvantages.First,despite of his denial of genetic determinism,Habermas’ persistence on the distinction between the grown and the made makes his justification inevitably settle in a single chain of determinism.Second,not only the equality of interpersonal relationship is ideal,but also in his argument against alien determination it is expounded not in a communicative,intersubjective sense but in a monologic,subject-closed sense.Third,lacking in anthropological evidence,the moralization of human nature is suspected of dogmatism.This paper is to defend Habermas’ normative status in eugenics.First,to sustain his strong normative status,I will dig out more detailed descriptive accounts from Habermas’ species ethics,which subject his species ethics into kind essentialism.Second,I will justify kind essentialism from a perspective of structural realism.Finally,by proving that human evolution under natural selection exhibits both kind essentialism and a view of human nature as open and dynamic,I will show that liberal eugenicists have overlooked the significance of natural selection in the process of human evolution.