Habermas’ use of Free Will in The Future of Human Nature

Sorry about the radio silence, guys. It seems that summer was less conducive to real scholarly work than I had hoped it might be when I created this blog.

I have a more light-hearted work coming soon, hopefully to be up within the next few weeks.

Anyway, this one comes from my Medicine & Ethics class. I just turned it in this morning, and I'm sincerely hoping that my professor never finds this blog. It would be easy to prove that I turned it in to him before I posted it here, but I'd still have to explain why I'm such a huge nerd.

Jurgen Habermas, in case I did not make this clear enough in my paper, wrote a book to explain why he thinks genetic modification of humans is wrong. Essentially, he believes that if babies' attributes are chosen--hair color, eye color, not at risk for childhood leukemia, you name it--then that child's free will has been taken away and ergo that child can never ever lead a moral life. I, er, take issue with this opinion here.

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Habermas’ use of Free Will in The Future of Human Nature

Within his work, The Future of Human Nature, Jurgen Habermas creates an argument for where we as a society might draw the line regarding our impending ability to manipulate the genes and phenotypes of potential humans. For Habermas, that line is governed by whether or not one preserves the autonomy of the potentially modified future humans. Habermas’ inclusion of autonomy is grounded in the work of Kierkegaard and it is strongly tied to Kierkegaard’s ideas about Free Will. However, Kierkegaard died roughly a century before modern neuroscience and psychology were able to bring in the relevant data. This forces us to ask whether the evidence that has been gathered from modern psychology regarding the concept of Free Will is in line with, or in contradiction to, Habermas’ usage.

For Habermas, the answer to the question of how to live an ethical life is derived from Kierkegaard, who he says answered the question, “with a postmetaphysical concept of ‘being-able-to-be-oneself.’” (Habermas, 2003, 5) Though there may be other concerns beyond ‘being-able-to-be-oneself,’ they cannot be considered if one, in the first place, does not have one’s autonomy. Habermas’ other main distinction, between things which are grown and things which are made, is related to this. For Habermas, things which are grown maintain their autonomy, whereas things which are made have no control over the determination of their lives and cannot be considered autonomous, nor by extension capable of living an ethical life. If a parent makes any changes to the natural process of infant development, then they would be taking away said autonomy and therefore condemning such children to be incapable of living ethical lives. When Habermas writes about autonomy or an ability to be oneself, he is writing about the ability to live one’s life free from determinism, capable of making decisions and taking action upon them without influence from outside factors. What he fails to acknowledge or even mention is that there has been considerable debate about such an ability, which calls into question one of the major premises from which he constructs his argument.

Before moving into scientific evidences for the nonexistence of Free Will, and given that Kierkegaard himself was a theist, it is helpful to look at the religious history of the debate regarding Free Will. St. Augustine fully developed the concept as we now understand it, largely as a solution to the problem of theodicy (Bargh, 2008). If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, then one way to get him off-the-hook, so to speak, for all the evil in the world is to say that the existence of Free Will on the part of those to whom evil happens accounts for evil’s existence. In other words, that they deserve it. Not all Christian theologians have followed this line, however. After compiling the writings of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards, David G. Meyers (2008) notes that there are three mandatory limitations to Free Will within Christianity. Namely, it cannot violate God’s foreknowledge (i.e. nothing can be done without His implicit consent, ergo all Will is limited), it cannot violate God’s sovereignty, (i.e. Will cannot be Free because that implies that God’s plans are dependent upon our decisions), nor can it violate God’s grace (because every good we are capable of doing comes through God in the first place). Given these dilemmas, it is remarkable that the concept of Free Will has persisted among theists, and yet it has.

Having come far since its formal beginnings in the late 19^th century, Psychology is now in a position to comment empirically on the existence of many concepts from the Philosophy of Mind, including Free Will and Determinism. John Bargh (2008) wrote that what is truly surprising about the continuously deterministic findings of psychology is not that they seem to contradict Free Will, but “Instead, the surprise comes from the continuing overarching assumption of the field regarding the primacy of conscious will” (Bargh, 2008, 128). He notes that every other science takes a deterministic universe for granted and that psychologists often are surprised by deterministic results is embarrassing. He identifies three areas from which our actions are determined: Firstly, there are genetic determinants of behavior. Given the surety of evolution through natural selection, it would be absurd to assume that behavior is not also governed by genes. This connection is obvious in non-human animals, but its implications are being borne out in humans as well. Secondly, cultural determinants exist to guide us where genetic determinants would be too slow-acting to be beneficial. Thus aspects of our lives, such as language, are governed by the culture in which a child is raised rather than by a conscious will to learn to speak a specific language or to involve oneself in local customs. And finally, the sum of all experiences of a person’s life, that is, individual learning, adds an even finer level of constraints to what a person’s actions must be.

The most important research to date on Free Will seems to be Libet’s (1986) work on the neurophysiology of voluntary action. Libet set up three different timers which measured when a participant performed an action, when they chose to perform that action, and when their brains primed to perform that action. Libet found that his participants’ brains got ready to perform the assigned action between 0.3 and 0.5 seconds before they had the conscious experience of deciding to perform that action. The significance of this finding cannot be overstated. Half a second before anyone ever feels like having made a decision, that one’s brain has already made that decision on his behalf. With respect to our actions, it seems that our experience of Free Will is a latecomer.

Habermas’ argument, then, which is so firmly grounded on the autonomy of unborn children, loses its relevance entirely. Habermas’ main problem is that if a person were to determine in any way the genotype or phenotype of an unborn child, said adult would be condemning the child to a determined life, therefore a life in which the child cannot conform to Kierkegaard’s outdated notion of the good life. However, it has been made clear by empirical evidence that the child’s genotypes and phenotypes are determined regardless. Whether or not a child’s development is tampered-with makes no difference with respect to its own self-determination. Having removed the fallacious premise which supported Habermas’ conclusions, a new line must be drawn for the ethical dealings with proto-humans, a line which is consistent with modern data.

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Bargh, J. A. (2008). Free will is un-natural. In J. Baer, J Kaufman, & R. Baumeister (Eds.), Are we free? Psychology and free will (128-154). Oxford University Press.

Habermas, J. (2003). The future of human nature. Cambridge: Polity.

Libet, B. (1986). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8, 529-66.

Myers, D. C. (2008) Determined and Free. In J. Baer, J Kaufman, & R. Baumeister (Eds.), Are we free? Psychology and free will (32-43). Oxford University Press.