"There can be no return to a naive immediacy once we know that our natural dispositions depend on genetic contingency; to stick to them through thick and thin will be as false as sticking to the old 'organic' mores. According to Habermas, however, we should act as if this were not the case, and thus maintain our sense of dignity and autonomy. The paradox is that this autonomy can be preserved only by prohibiting access to the contingency which determines us - that is, by limiting the possibilities of scientific intervention. This is a new version of the old argument that, if we are to retain our moral dignity, it's better not to know certain things. Curtailing science, as Habermas seems to be suggesting, would come at the price of widening the split between science and ethics: a split which already prevents us from seeing the way these new conditions compel us to transform and reinvent the notions of freedom, autonomy and ethical responsibility."

new technology -> new imperatives?

"One reason Fukuyama moved from his 'end-of-history' theory to a consideration of the new threat posed by the brain sciences is that the biogenetic threat is a much more radical version of the 'end of history', one that has the potential to render the free autonomous subject of liberal democracy obsolete. There is a deeper reason, however, for Fukuyama's turn: the prospect of biogenetic manipulation has forced him, consciously or not, to take note of the dark obverse of his idealised image of liberal democracy. All of a sudden, he has been compelled to confront the prospect of corporations misusing the free market to manipulate people and engage in terrifying medical experiments, of rich people breeding their offspring as an exclusive race with superior mental and physical capacities, thus instigating a new class warfare. It is clear to Fukuyama that the only way to limit this danger is to reassert strong state control of the market and to develop new forms of a democratic political will."

fukutosser has obviously seen gattaca at last

"While agreeing with all this, I am tempted to add that we need these measures independently of the biogenetic threat, simply in order to control the potential of the global market economy. Maybe the problem is not biogenetics itself, but rather the context of power relations within which it functions. Fukuyama's arguments are at once too abstract and too concrete. He fails to raise the full philosophical implications of the new mind sciences and technologies, and to locate them in their antagonistic socioeconomic context. What he doesn't grasp (and what a true Hegelian should have grasped) is the necessary link between the two ends of history, the passage from the one to the other: the liberal-democratic end of history immediately turns into its opposite, since, in the hour of its triumph, it starts to lose its foundation - the liberal-democratic subject."

poor fuku getting pissed on..

Hegel would not have shrunk from the idea of the human genome and biogenetic intervention, preferring ignorance to risk. Instead, he would have rejoiced at the shattering of the old idea that 'Thou art that,' as though our notions of human identity had been definitively fixed. Contrary to Habermas, we should take the objectivisation of the genome fully on board. Reducing my being to the genome forces me to traverse the phantasmal stuff of which my ego is made, and only in this way can my subjectivity properly emerge.

aha