Book Reviews 249 by Seana Valentine Shiffrin; ‘Raz on the Intelligibility of Bad Acts’ by Michael Stocker; and ‘What Is It to Wrong Someone? A Puzzle about Justice’ by Michael Thompson. Together with another recent anthology (Luckas H. Meyer, Stanley L. Paulson and Thomas W. Pogge [eds.], Rights, Culture, and the Law: Themes from the Legal and Political Philosophy of Joseph Raz [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993]), the papers collected in Reason and Value make an invaluable companion to the ethical work of Joseph Raz, whom the editors aptly describe as one of the leading philosophers of the present day, and put some of its central themes in broader philosophical perspective.

Hanoch Sheinman Rice University [email protected]

J. Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 160 pp. ISBN 0745629873 9 (pbk). Hardback/Paperback: £40.00/13.99.

Bioethics in the United States today finds itself in a crisis of both method and prac- tice, particularly in the area of understanding and regulating genetic technology. In August of 2001, one of the most pressing public sphere issues for President George W. Bush was the appropriate regulation of US stem cell research. Post 9/11 US public discourse about science increasingly organized itself along somewhat bifur- cated political lines. Such phenomenon indirectly supported perceived ideological fissures in the transatlantic community as well, particularly in Germany and France. Objective, rational thinking regarding the development and regulation of scientific technology seemed to diminish—and this infringed upon the legitimate domain of bioethics in national policy. Alongside this, the methods of bioethics have been routinely criticized for lack of rigour. For many, standard Principalism and Casuistry, methods ushered in during the 1970s as a kind of interdisciplinary bridge between science and philosophy, failed to forge a genuine departure from a paternalism that allowed the illusion of scientific objectivity to abuse human beings. In short, bioethics has not fully developed the means to reach its own public service ends, regrettably, during great expansion of the scientific enterprise and its sense of commercial antici- pation driven by the looming genetic revolution. Real human interests evolve under the rubric of emancipation. A sense of pessi- mism about modern events can indeed be augmented by a sense of hope, given the right ideological and philosophical footing. After all, not everyone who thinks about bioethics, now clearly an international enterprise, is a devotee of Principalism accord- ing to T.L. Beauchamp and J.F. Childress (Principles of Biomedical Ethics [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1983]; this text has become a standard concep- tual model for illuminating issues in medical ethics, and is routinely used in the US as a model that interacts between clinical science and philosophy). A methodologi- cal infusion of German critical theory into the realm of bioethics grants the disci- pline the tools it needs to reinvent itself according to its true aims. Such critical approaches identify the real power structures controlling scientific technology and concomitant tangible domains of human vulnerability that such technology endan- gers. A sense of praxis, the public and political engagement that can lead to change, 250 JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 3.2 (2006) is held in equipoise in critical theory in such a way that public discourse works alongside, instead of subservient to, commercial and political aspects of scientific progress. Although not prone to hyperbole, I would like to suggest that the book entitled The Future of Human Nature by the world’s most important living critical theorist, Jürgen Habermas, represents a significant achievement in this important area; it represents an emancipatory intent in bioethics. This book should be read by serious students and practitioners in the field. Habermas at once places this book (a series of texts initiated by his receiving the Dr Margrit Egnơr Prize in 2000 and a corresponding lecture at the University of Zurich in 2001) within the distinct philosophical tradition of Frankfurt School Critical Theory by referencing his predecessor, Theodor W. Adorno’s late text Minima Moralia (a chiasmus of Aristotle’s Magna Moralia). After posing the reflective question (via a reference to Max Frisch) of ‘How then shall we live?’, Habermas writes: But today, in our post-metaphysical age, philosophy no longer pretends to have answers to questions regarding the personal, or even the collective conduct of life. Theodor Adorno begins with a melancholy refrain of Nietzsche’s ‘joyful science’— by admitting this inability: ‘The melancholy science from which I make this offer- ing to my friend relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy…: the teaching of the good life’. But ethics has now regressed, as Adorno believed, and become the melancholy science because it allows, at best only scattered, aphoristic ‘reflections from a damaged life’ (p. 1; the passage from T.W. Adorno is in his Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott [London: New Left Books, 1974], p. 15). In the trajectory of critical theory Adorno and Habermas represent two forks in the road, Adorno being a contextualist, Habermas a transcendentalist. In and of itself, this tension sets up a current dialectic in critical theory on which Habermas embarks. His is a positive approach to rationality and modernity that acknowledges a profound paucity in current normative values. In this book project Habermas brings pragmatic (yet transcendental) approaches to understanding and regulating genetic technology in both ethical and communicative terms, while remaining true to his school. Whether contextual or transcendental, the activity of German critical theory is located in the subjective–objective dialectic. Habermas notes that ‘the advances of genetic engineering tend to blur the deeply rooted categorical distinctions between the subjective and the objective, the grown and the made. What is at stake, therefore, with the instrumentalization of prepersonal life is the ethical self-understanding of the species, which is crucial for whether or not we may go on to see ourselves as beings committed to moral judgment and action. Where we lack compelling moral reasons, we have to let ourselves be guided by the signposts set up by the ethics of the species’ (p. 71; Habermas’s emphasis). Herein lies the primary thesis of this work, which illuminates the limitations of moral arguments about the origin of life, per se. It is ‘an attempt seeking to attain more transparence for a rather mixed-up set of intuitions’ (p. 22) that stresses the effort to launch a quasi-anthropological approach to self-understandings among human beings through communicative action. In the history of medical science, Germany’s is the most horrific history to illus- trate the misuse of eugenics and racial ideology. The significance of Germany’s appropriation of the eugenics movement in support of the Nazi state ‘biocracy’ that