Hastings Center Report

What do we need to know about human nature to be opposed to changing it? Do we need to be able to define it? Would it be enough to make just a few critical distinctions in specific contexts and cases? How sharp would these distinctions need to be?

Such questions are implicit in an article by Elizabeth Fenton that continues a conversation Bernard Prusak began in these pages last year. Prusak sought to introduce the Report's audience to a way of objecting to enhancement technologies—specifically, to prenatal genetic enhancement of children—developed by the German political philosopher Jürgen Habermas. That objection, roughly, is that if a parent made enhancements to a child without the child's own consent, the child would lack one of the preconditions of autonomy: because humans do not just exist in bodies, wrote Prusak, but also are bodies, a child whose body has been given enhanced mathematical or musical or athletic abilities would be "imprisoned by a body that mutely repeats to her alien expectations—[and so] might be prevented from having a sense of self, or 'goals, ideals, plans, and intentions' that she recognizes as her own."

Like Prusak, Fenton thinks Habermas's argument turns on the preconditions of autonomy. She presents Habermas as claiming that the project of developing genetic enhancement technology is internally inconsistent. Developing the technology requires that we see ourselves as "the authors of our own life histories" (Habermas's phrase), but using them will undermine a child's ability to do that.

Prusak found the argument convincing enough to say that, at the very least, it raises questions that lack, but need, good answers. Fenton finds the argument to be badly flawed. One of the problems, she argues, is that the argument requires that we be able to draw a clear line between what is natural and what is manufactured, and therefore that human nature be "something definable and fixed," when in fact there is no particular hope of saying just what human nature is nor why it should be like that. Whether it could be different and better is just the question that the development of genetic technology forces us to ask.

Priscilla Alderson and colleagues, and Cassandra Aspinall in a commentary on the opposite page, ask about the requirements of children's autonomy a bit farther along in life. Alderson et al. argue that at least some children are capable of becoming intimately involved in making their own health care decisions. Aspinall agrees, but delimits the generality of the claim: sometimes, she cautions, parents are able to make health care decisions on their children's behalf. Among those interventions are some aimed not at improving function, but merely at normalizing appearance and avoiding some "unwanted effects" on identity.

At this point, these two separate lines of discussion offer a hint of converging. We can imagine cases that involve genetic enhancements of the sort Fenton has in mind, but that are offered to a child in the age range Alderson and colleagues discuss. Imagine parents who, wanting an athletic child and getting a bookish child, think about using gene transfer techniques to improve muscular function (in fact, some believe such techniques will be among the first significant human genetic enhancements available). My own intuition is that this is more obviously troubling than prenatal genetic enhancement—and that it does not require a general theory of human nature. I'm not sure, though, whether it sheds light on the prenatal case, or is just a different case.

For that, we'll need to see how the conversation plays out. [End Page 2]