Joel Anderson

Habermas's collection of essays "The Future of Human Nature" is of particular interest for two sorts of reasons. For those interested in bioethics, it contains a genuinely new set of arguments for placing serious restrictions on using prenatal genetic technologies to “enhance” offspring. And for those interested in Habermas’s moral philosophy, it contains a number of new developments in his “discourse ethics”—not the least of which is a willingness to engage in applied ethics at all. The real key to Habermas’s argument is that human personhood and moral agency presuppose certain modes of relating to oneself that are threatened by the asymmetrical way in which genetic enhancements would presumably work. Thus, instead of taking up and then extending familiar normative concerns about unequal opportunities or the criteria for moral personhood, Habermas believes that the emerging technologies of genetic enhancement demand genuinely new arguments, and he proposes to focus on the effects of genetic programming on whether the agent can consider herself free and equal—effects, that is, regarding what one might call the reflexive attitudinal preconditions for moral agency. Like contractarians and Kantians more generally, Habermas faces difficulties accommodating the intuition that we might have obligations toward potential persons. The difficulty is particularly pronounced in the case of Habermas’s “discourse theory of morality,” since it construes the moral point of view in terms of processes of deliberation among all those affected by the norm at issue which the participants consider in the deliberative process to be open, fair, and inclusive. Future generations do not fit neatly into this deliberative process, nor do prepersonal humans. Moral norms adjudicated in such discourse clearly affect their interests, but they cannot themselves participate in the discourse. In the past, Habermas and other “discourse ethicists” have tried to address this worry by introducing “advocatory discourses.” But this move threatens to undo a distinctive, appealing feature of Habermas’s moral theory: the pragmatist insistence on the innovative, critical, unpredictable discourse generated by actual participants in discourse and the refusal (contra Rawls, in particular) to rely on hypothetical representatives. In The Future of Human Nature, Habermas ventures a different strategy,focused on expanding what he calls the “ethical” domain, which differs from the “moral” domain in being a matter of a community’s articulation of its core values and conception of the good. Previously, Habermas distinguished “ethical-existential” and “ethical-political” domains, as a matter of who an individual or a community, respectively, is and wants to be. In the present book, Habermas makes the remarkable move of introducing the category of the “species-ethical,” which is supposed to be the domain of questions raised by the human species as a whole about the question of what it is to be human. This theoretical move extends further steps Habermas had already taken in speaking of ethical solidarity within the global community.

Should society intervene to prevent the risky behavior of precocious teenagers even if it would be impermissible to intervene with adults who engage in the same risky behavior? The problem is well illustrated by the legal case of the 13-year-old Dutch girl Laura Dekker, who set out in 2009 to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world alone, succeeding in January 2012. In this paper we use her case as a point of entry for discussing the fundamental question of how to demarcate childhood from adulthood. After summarizing the case, we identify a ‘demarcation dilemma’ that frames much of the public and expert debate. On the one hand, it seems morally imperative ‘to treat like alike’, which means that both children and adults should be allowed to undertake all actions for which they have the relevant competences. On the other hand, requiring proportional treatment of children and adults seems to neglect the special nature of childhood as a distinct stage in life that ends at a specific age. We introduce the notion of a ‘regime of childhood’ to deal with this problem. This regime includes several dimensions, including the limited liability for children, the supervisory responsibilities of parents, the role of age-based thresholds, and the overarching purpose of childhood as a context for developing autonomy. We argue that, all things considered, there are good reasons not to shift to a regime that offers individual children the option of qualifying for adulthood on the basis of age-neutral criteria

From the outset, critical social theory has sought to diagnose people’s participation in their own oppression, by revealing the roots of irrational and self-undermining choices in the complex interplay between human nature, social structures, and cultural beliefs. As part of this project, Ideologiekritik has aimed to expose faulty conceptions of this interplay, so that the objectively pathological character of what people are “freely” choosing could come more clearly into view. The challenge, however, has always been to find a way of doing this without arrogantly assuming special access to what is good for people. And this danger of paternalism is one to which social theorists have all too often fallen prey. In this brief essay, I focus on contemporary instances of clearly self-defeating behavior in contexts of complex choices. I begin by discussing a recent attempt to diagnose and solve these failures of choices, namely the public policy recommendations of behavioral economist Richard Thaler and reform-minded legal theorist Cass Sunstein. Their influential “libertarian paternalist” approach is particularly interesting, both in what it includes (attention to the socially constructed nature of choice situations and the roots of the problems in human nature) and in what it leaves out (an understanding of the social construction of human nature and an adequate appreciation of the value of autonomy). After discussing it, I consider a broadly perfectionist alternative, to the effect that the problem lies in a failure to adequately appreciate the importance of developing autonomy. I then turn to sketching the outlines of a new approach, based on the concept of “autonomy gaps,” which approaches overly demanding policies in relational and action-theoretical terms. In the final section, I show how this provides the basis for an analysis both in terms of a critique of ideology and of social pathology.

Voting advice applications (VAAs) are interactive online tools designed to assist voters by improving the basis on which they decide how to vote. Current VAAs typically aim to do so by matching users’ policy-preferences with the positions of parties or candidates. But this ‘matching model’ depends crucially on implicit, contestable presuppositions about the proper functioning of the electoral process and about the forms of competence required for good citizenship—presuppositions associated with the social choice conception of democracy. This paper aims to make those presuppositions explicit and to contrast them with two possible alternative perspectives on VAAs, associated with deliberative and agonistic conceptions of democracy and citizenship.