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Any ethical treatment ofliberal eugenics and of biotechnology in general must presuppose, if not explicitly expose, an understanding of biology in general and of human biology in particular. Critical Theory distinguished itself as, amongst other things, a philosophically guided, cross-disciplinarily oriented expression of the social and human sciences that understood the enterprise of knowledge as a practical human pursuit that could not hide behind a veil of neutrality but rather had to expose and defend its guiding normative commitments. Scientific knowledge could not be construed as a neutral instrument to use or abuse but rather as itself already structurally embedded and implicated in the social reproduction of a society or specifically poised to stand in a reflective and critical relationship to it. How we understand what it means to be human is a normatively structured and norm constitutive enterprise no matter what level of analysis is undertaken. A normative stand on biotechnology is ipso facto a normative stand on what it is to be human, that is, an 'anthropology' in the philosophical sense.
In a recent book entided The Future of Human Nature, Jiirgen Habermas has, for the first time despite a large and extensive oeuvre, directly addressed questions concerning biology, biotechnology and the prospects of liberal eugenics. Rather, however, than extending the Critical tradition into this timely domain, Habermas (even if contrary to cursory appearance) has retreated from the anthropological perspective of his earlier work and rather set forth a thin neo-Kantian based ethics of abstention that swallows and regurgitates the media-hyped jargon of genetic programming holus-bolus. Where unconditional condemnations of reproductive technologies have previously been predicated upon 'metaphysical' criteria, as for example in the case of the Roman Catholic Church, Habermas' goal and presumed achievement appears to have been that of arriving at comparable conclusions on 'post-metaphysical' grounds (a phrase that is peppered throughout the text). But the cost of matching the metaphysically-based categorical rejection of liberal eugenics on the grounds of a putatively post-metaphysical argument is, for Habermas, the need to embrace a preformationistic jargon of 'genetically programmed individuals' and yet in so doing entering into a paradoxical and ultimately untenable relationship with exactly those anthropological presuppositions that his entire argument must depend upon. In order to best elucidate the sense in...