Much conventional social science rests on the assumption that there is a significant element of chance to the precise expression of our genetic heritage, a natural lottery that is then overlaid by the influences of society and culture that distribute opportunities and rewards. While we may debate the precise contributions of nature and nurture to social outcomes, and acknowledge the degree to which human reproduction rests on assortative mating – our tendency to have babies with people who are rather like ourselves – we have rarely supposed that the elements of ‘nature’ can be brought under deliberate societal control. When we have, the results have often been deeply unpleasant, as with the eugenic experiments that occurred in a considerable number of countries during the first half of the twentieth century, and survived in schemes like the Repository for Germinal Choice, the sperm bank created in 1980 to receive donations from Nobel Prize winners and others believed to be marked by genius.

This assumption is, however, being radically challenged by developments in the biosciences, which may, at some future and rather indefinite point, offer technologies to determine our biological endowment, or that of our offspring. In the short term, drugs for sleep management and memory improvement are already beginning to offer their users opportunities to gain competitive advantages over non-users. These interventions are claimed to be fundamentally novel in the sense that, while medicine has traditionally been concerned with remedying failures of the body – correcting deviance and seeking to restore normality – they offer the possibility of enhancement. Biological interventions can create beings that are truly super-human, with capacities in excess of those with which nature has, or would otherwise have, endowed them.

The three books under review contribute to a debate on the potential social and ethical consequences of such interventions. Habermas draws primarily on German traditions in critical theory and Buchanan et al. on Rawlsian liberalism, while Fukuyama has written a more distinctively populist book, based broadly on Aristotelian traditions in philosophical thought. Although Habermas and Fukuyama are often considered as standard-bearers for quite different political traditions, of the European Left and the neo-conservative Right, they converge in this case on a shared hostility to the consequences of human enhancement.

Enhancement and enlightenment

The Future of Human Nature contains three essays by Jurgen Habermas first published during 2001, together with a reply to critics of the main thesis on the implications of human genetic enhancement, drafted in 2002. (The last essay deals with the relationship between religion and secular science in the contemporary world in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and will not be discussed here.)

At the core of Habermas’s work is his defense of the Enlightenment against the pessimism and nihilism of its contemporary critics. For Habermas, the search for a world governed by reason and respect for common humanity, expressed in moral universals, is not dead but merely a project yet to be completed. His discussion of enhancement, then, both continues an argument against those who seem to have abandoned the project and an evaluation of the implications of intergenerational biological modification for that project.

Habermas accuses contemporary philosophers of giving up on any attempt to define what constitutes the good life as far as individuals are concerned. His particular target here is Rawls, whose view of the good society shrugs off the question of what constitutes good lives for its members. All that interests Rawls and his followers is the justice of the aggregate choices being made, rather than the provision of any template for the choice making. Provided that the outcome is equally just for all, they have no concern for the behaviour that produces it. Ethics has been abandoned to psychotherapy – the good life is the one that feels right rather than the one that will survive moral scrutiny. Habermas, however, sees ethics as a fundamental constituent of social order. He draws eclectically on arguments from existentialism, phenomenology, and pragmatism to argue for ethical universals that arise from the conditions for social interaction and the generation of the self through engagement with others. Without such universals, human societies cannot sustain themselves: individuals cannot generate a sense of their own autonomy and responsibility, or of the obligations of respect that they owe to others. Ethics are the preconditions for society, which is, in turn, the precondition for the creation of selves.

While Habermas concedes the force of the liberal arguments against his position at a societal level – in effect that we have a choice of engagements and relationships in which to develop our self-hood so that there may be a plurality of possible societies and cultures – he is still concerned to defend his position at the level of the species. Does our embodiment, our species-being, constitute a universal that is prior to society and, hence, still a possible basis for claims to egalitarian respect? If so, what are the implications of bringing this under human control so that we become authors of our own evolution? Historically, genetic endowment was a lottery, but now it is becoming a product. What are the implications for the Enlightenment assumption that all humans are equal as humans and thereby entitled to equal respect from each other? Genetic enhancement is also a means by which one generation can seek to control the next, for the dead to control the living. The opportunity to make oneself and one’s world anew is lost. What does this mean for the next generation’s sense of themselves as autonomous agents, authors of their own lives? What does it mean for a human being to be an artefact, the product of parental choice rather than the supposedly random merging of gametes?

Habermas formulates his response as a critique of liberal eugenics, the notion that decisions about genetic enhancement should be left purely to individual decisions in the market. As a number of other critics have observed, liberal eugenics does not wholly avoid the problems of state-sponsored eugenics that tarnished human societies in the twentieth century. While it is true that negative selection by individual parents avoids some of the problems of negative selection by state fiat, it is far from clear that states can disclaim responsibility for the outcomes or, as an empirical matter, that parental choices can ever wholly satisfy the tests of autonomy required by principled liberalism. Habermas, however, focuses less on the consequences of negative eugenics for those selected against than on the impossibility of drawing a defensible boundary between remedying defects, whether by genomic manipulation or selective attrition, and enhancement. He accepts selective abortion, although he has reservations about pre-implantation diagnosis (PGD), seeing this as much closer to intergenerational design. The lack of critical discussion, and differentiation between the abortion and enhancement debates, means that there is a danger of precedents being set by intervention for ‘good cause’, which may then be irresistible in their extension to other goals. Liberal eugenics justifies its interventions by assuming the consent of the person affected to the avoidance of extreme ills. Some writers from the perspective of disability rights might question this position, but their arguments are not addressed in these essays.

What might the world of liberal eugenics look like? Habermas sees this as much less egalitarian, because parental choices embed pre-existing inequalities in ways that cannot be transcended as social inequalities may be. It is a world where individuals are less autonomous, because their parents have chosen significant parts of their being for them. Birth is no longer a significant rupture between one generation and its successors, so people are at best co-authors of their own lives. There are no fresh starts because we cannot deny or depart from our biological inheritance in the way that we may be able to do with our social inheritance. Humans are products rather than beings. As such, they represent the choices of their parents without being able to call their parents to account for them. If they are unequal products, they may not merit equal respect: currently no-one can be blamed for the genomic ticket that they draw in nature’s lottery but this will not be true in the eugenic future. We may pity those whose parents made the ‘wrong’ choice but we may not be obliged to consider them as human equals.

What can be done? Here Habermas has yet to reason his way to a conclusion. He discards the possibility of restraint being derived from traditional or religious principles. He recognizes the power of the alliance between the rhetorics of science and liberalism in their joint promise that liberty will lead to better health and longevity. He finds it hard to see any area of human freedom without wishing to regulate it, although he has no suggestions about how this might be done institutionally, who would have the status to determine what was and was not acceptable and the means by which they might be held accountable, and to whom. There is an awkward dilemma in that someone’s freedom is necessarily compromised – either that of the parental generation who are banned from using enhancement technologies or the generation of their offspring who finds theirs curtailed by the effects of their parents’ choices.

Back to Aristotle

Although Fukuyama has often been seen as a high priest of US neo-conservatism, particularly in some of his writing on foreign policy, his thinking has continued to evolve, particularly since his encounter with Durkheim in Trust (1995). Our Posthuman Future reflects his continuing concern about quite what kind of society radical individualism leads to. Although his arguments are grounded in a natural law tradition that was rejected by Habermas’s Enlightenment, they share a view that human nature may provide a basis for the acquisition and definition of rights that are prior to any particular set of social arrangements. Fukuyama, then, rejects the post-Kantian attempt, following Hulme’s proscription of the derivation of ‘ought’ from ‘is’, to specify a deontology that is independent of human nature. Instead, he returns to Ancient Greek philosophical writings that tried to define what a Good Society might look like in terms of its consistency with the realization of supposedly immanent human qualities. The Greeks were constrained by the limitations of the empirical understanding of their time but this gap can, he suggests, now be filled by evolutionary biology. Although many areas of uncertainty still remain, this allows us to see that certain qualities are distinctively human and distinguish us from all other species on the planet. While it is not clear that many evolutionary biologists would accept this claim, arguing that the naturalization of humans within the Darwinian framework tends to stress their identity with other species, it is, for example, consistent with the position adopted by John Paul II in reformulating the official Catholic position on evolution. This is accepted as a fact, but at some point in the process, humans become qualitatively different from other species, whether through their acquisition of a soul or a capacity to transcend the constraints of environment in a way that no other species has accomplished.

Fukuyama’s problem with human enhancement is that it creates the possibility of interference with this ‘essence of humanity’. Human beings can no longer be thought of as fundamentally equal because genetic modification will introduce permanent differences that cannot be transcended by cultural interventions. There will no longer be an identity of interest between citizens through a common humanity. Indeed, the very notion of ‘citizen’ may be challenged. Do unenhanced humans have the same participation rights in the polity as their genetic superiors? Fukuyama questions the capacity of any individual government to regulate these interventions in a positive way, but is also skeptical about the possibility of any international agreement on regulation. States that have already shown themselves indifferent to bioethics in pursuit of competitive economic advantage are unlikely to be troubled by the issues that he is raising. However, an international free for all risks institutionalizing permanent genetic differences between different states, depending upon the qualities selected for enhancement by their current regimes. The posthuman world could be one of benign slavery rather than enhanced freedom or human dignity. Although Fukuyama does not use this language explicitly, it would be the end of history with a vengeance.

Beyond Rawls

Buchanan and his colleagues share many of the concerns expressed by Habermas and Fukuyama, but retain a liberal faith in their solubility. From Chance to Choice adopts a Rawlsian perspective on enhancement to offer what is, in many ways, a more subtle and nuanced account than either of the other books reviewed here; although, in fairness, both are more avowedly polemical. Buchanan et al.’s core question is: what principles should guide public policy and individual choice about genetic interventions in a just and humane society?

How can we make decisions without being exposed to the charge of eugenics? They identify two main current models of genetic intervention:

1. Public health. This is the classic eugenicist position. It is concerned with the effect on groups, and tends to be consequentialist and utilitarian. The aggregate balance of benefits and harms is assessed without undue concern for their distribution. As a result, it may sacrifice individual benefits for collective gain, in preventing a vertical epidemic of genetic disorder.

2. Personal service. Here, genetic interventions are presented as a matter for individual choice. This approach elevates autonomy at the expense of justice. The resulting problems are dealt with by ad hoc restrictions rather than clear theory.

The authors explore the limitations of both models and attempt to offer a systematic account of how non-malfeasance and justice should constrain autonomy. Their discussion is aimed at institutions – it assumes virtue in individuals but does not explore this.

In general, the approach is based on Rawls and concerned mainly with equality of opportunity and social inclusion. Enhancement may be acceptable if it promotes equality of opportunity but should be opposed if barriers to access mean that it is only available to those who are already advantaged and worsens inequality. It should be open to all or open to none. Having said this, however, there are difficult questions about how far it is legitimate to intervene to address natural inequality? What is the boundary between misfortune and injustice? Could intervention damage a child’s right to an open future? Similarly, how quickly should we conclude that genetic interventions, rather than institutional change, hold the key to reductions in social exclusion? Should we modify people with disabilities or make buildings more accessible? There may be ways in which genetic enhancement can achieve greater justice, but other routes should not be excluded.

This analysis identifies some significant ambiguities in Rawls’s own position, particularly on the relationship between equality and equality of opportunity. Rawls is reluctant to compensate those who lose out as a result of brute luck factors that societies cannot control, of which the natural lottery of inheritance is one. He envisions a society in which there are no barriers to the maximization of individual potential, because of compensation for inherited social inequality, but accepts that the results may still be unequal because potential varies randomly. Human enhancement technologies challenge this assumption. The losers are no longer random but distributed according to the wealth, sophistication, and technological access of their parents. They are victims of intergenerational injustice rather than blind fate.

As with Habermas and Fukuyama, Buchanan et al. are exercised by the implications for human nature and the equality of persons. They are uncomfortable with the notion that human nature might be progressively reduced to those aspects of biological endowment that happen currently to be unalterable. As different communities modify endowments in different ways, we may find that this compromises both individuals’ sense of moral agency – if this is determined rather than chosen – and their sense of mutual obligation or shared fate. What are my responsibilities to those who have chosen a different biological future from mine? Is the result to force parents to choose modifications to their children because the baselines for definitions of normality and the acquisition of membership in a moral community have shifted? In such circumstances, does genetic enhancement really extend autonomy? It may certainly prevent children from having an open genetic future.

Ultimately, Buchanan et al. argue, a liberal society need not necessarily prohibit genetic perfectionism as either an individual or a collective project. Liberal societies already try to perfect citizens by investments in cultural and moral development and this is seen both as a proper object of state action and a legitimate terrain of political contest, as different groups dispute the specific normative goals to be achieved and the investment strategies appropriate to them. Human enhancement need not impinge on reproductive freedom, provided that there is no outright coercion to follow particular pathways. The state, however, has an obligation to sustain its own neutrality in the face of these decisions, to ensure that pre-existing inequalities are not worsened and that harm is not done by the use of ineffective or dangerous technologies. If technologies beneficial to goals endorsed by a majority of citizens become available, the state must ensure that they are equally accessible to all and assure their quality, while also ensuring that they do not become an additional basis for social exclusion, other than by the positive choice of those who choose not to adopt them.

So what’s new …?

These three books represent a debate that has been conducted with increasing energy over the last decade or so, as the territorial claims of biology have expanded to increasing areas of the social sciences. It is important to point out that all of them accept the claims made by a few high-profile biologists at face value rather than treating them with proper skepticism. While we are seeing a few pharmaceutical agents being introduced that may have some temporary effects on human performance, the kind of radical germ-line manipulation entertained by all these authors clearly lies far in the future. In effect, these works reflect the high-water mark of the co-option of the social sciences to the hype around this project. The manipulation of public expectations is critical to securing a continuing flow of resources to the scientists involved but the role of the social sciences is to investigate rather than to reinforce this. The comparative stasis of the science is reflecting in the rapid intellectual exhaustion of the ESRC’s Genetics Programme, which has increasingly sought to colonize other areas like stem cell research, neuroscience, and synthetic biology simply because there is so little new to write about developments in genomics.

If we examine the key themes of these works, we can see that none is particularly new. The influence exerted by one generation on the next, through institutions and culture, was well established by Herbert Spencer more than a century ago, when he argued that the social sciences had a mission to explore the consequences of this dead hand on the possibilities for human progress. Spencer also understood evolution much better than any of the writers discussed here: he would not have made the mistake of assuming that changes made in one generation could not be reversed or modified in the next. Similarly, there are important respects in which the current debate adds little to Michael Young’s classic discussion, The Rise of the Meritocracy, which, many of us might feel, has a great deal more to say about the problems of the social residuum in developed societies that have been marked by more than half a century of increasing concerns for equality of opportunity. What are we to do with the young people left behind by the increasingly efficient skimming of the cream from the working class? If social mobility is represented as a matter of individual achievement or wise parental choices rather than class advance, what obligations do the successful have to the unsuccessful? This is essentially the same question as these authors pose for biologically based differentiation – but it is a question that is present here and now, not deferred to some distant and speculative future.

All these works are thoughtful additions to a serious debate about important things. At the same time, they also contribute to the way in which the present preoccupation with the novel allows scholars to escape engagement with the issues that have been central to the social sciences since their emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This neophilia postpones concerns for social justice, and the rights and responsibilities associated with membership in the species homo sapiens, into some distant future rather than treating them as live issues to be addressed in the present. Again, no-one with any measure of evolutionary understanding would consider that history ended at some point in the last fifty years – whether with the supposed birth of the risk society, the end of ideological competition between great systems of political thought or the establishment of a new imperial economic and political hegemony. Each of these myths, as Malinowski recognized, tells us more about the present in which they are recounted than the past they purport to analyse. In the same way, our contemporary challenge is to live in the present, and to examine the impact of these imagined futures on that present, rather than to compete with the authors of Star Trek in the production of those futures – something that creative writers do rather better than social scientists anyway. Considered in that light, we can see that these essays, and the debate in which they participate, might be a topic for the sociology of knowledge as much as for the bioethicist or political philosopher. Should we actually see them as coded expressions of concern about the implications of decreasing social mobility and the runaway wealth of a global elite that has decoupled its members from any sense of a common humanity with others?