Short literature notices

John Harris’ new book ‘‘Enhancing Evolution’’ is provoking and thought-provoking since it makes an ‘‘ethical case for making better people’’ (intended as an ethical, not a policy proposal). It is provoking since it deals with two hotly debated ethical problems: the question of enhancing human beings and the moral status of the human embryo, and it deals with these problems in a clear language attacking a lot of deeply rooted moral intuitions surrounding human nature or the value of the given. Harris’ claims must be provocative since he claims that enhancing persons is a moral duty because enhancing a life of a person (or the person itself—Harris does not make a clear distinction here) means making that life better for that person herself. And it is a moral duty, at least prima facie, to enable persons to lead better lives. Although Harris does not discuss his own meta-ethical stance in detail, it is obvious that he does not accept deontological arguments as sound moral arguments. Thus he attacks philosophers like Michael Sandel or Jürgen Habermas criticising their arguments as inconclusive or unclear and not universally accessible (the reader must get the impression that in this book only the meta-ethical stance of Harris is accepted as universally acceptable). As a liberal, Harris accepts that other persons (among them prominent philosophers like George Annas, John Finnis or Leon Kass, to mention a few) will reject enhancement for themselves, but refuses to accept that these thinkers want to prescribe what other persons should be allowed to do on the basis of rationally not justifiable premises. Relying on human nature is, according to Harris, no plausible basis for making enhancement unethical. On the one hand, evolution is a process wherein each stage of development is contingent and subject to random change. On the other hand evolution’s results can, if enhancement is possible at all, be enhanced. Since making persons’ lives a better life for them is a moral duty, enhancing evolution is ethically mandatory and the evolutionary given human nature is of no intrinsic value. Moreover, since evolution itself will not shrink from overcoming obstacles, then preserving human nature cannot be morally mandatory. For sure, some of the arguments in this book are not elaborated carefully enough. For example, Harris rejects potentiality-based arguments presupposing a notion of potentiality which would make this notion useless for science, too (cf. pp. 97 and 166 ff.). If I am right in assuming that biology cannot do without a notion of potentiality, this result is unwelcome and I cannot see how Harris can avoid this without weakening his objections against using the notion of potentiality in biomedical ethics. But Harris’ plea for enhancement is not only provoking. It is really thought-provoking since it demonstrates how deep the philosophical issues are and that we have to address them if we want to make explicit all the metaphysical, meta-ethical and ethical premises all participants in the debate rely on. But without such philosophical reflection a serious and fruitful discussion will not be possible. It is among the merits of this extraordinarily well written book to make this visible.