3: Bioethics and human nature: perspectives from philosophical anthropology

Overview & Synopsis

Bioethics deals with the governance of life science technologies. An appropriate understanding of the relationship between life, nature, and human nature is thus always presupposed in bioethical discourses. However, bioethics has encountered difficulties in taking a stance about this. References to human nature are often condemned as pre-modern, illiberal, and essentialist. Therefore, mainstream bioethics tries to avoid taking a stance and chooses starting points that can hope to achieve broad societal consensus. These strategies are, however, not very plausible when a liberal consensus is unlikely to receive global support and when bioethical questions become more challenging. This chapter acknowledges the importance of these challenges and assumes that it is necessary to clarify the normative status of references to concepts like ‘human nature’ and ‘the human being’. It will argue that debates on philosophical anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century make it possible to refer to human nature without problematic essentialist and ahistorical assumptions. Specifically, it will introduce the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner and show how it is both important and necessary for ethics in general, and bioethics in particular.