Proper procedures for informed consent are widely recognized as an ethical requirement for biomedical research involving human beings, in particular as a means to respect the autonomy and personal integrity of potential and actual research participants.

The overarching question addressed in this article is whether there is something that might reasonably be called a Habermasian approach or perspective that bioethical enquiry might utilize.

Recent developments in genomic science hold out the tantalizing prospect of soon being able to treat and prevent a wide variety of medical conditions through gene therapy. In time, it may be possible to use similar techniques not simply to combat disease but also to enhance, or improve on, normal human functioning.

One of the most fundamental tenets of medical research, enshrined in the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki, is that scientific investigation involving human beings requires the informed consent of the subjects.

Innovations in science and technology are often the source of public concern, but few have generated debates as intense and at the same time with such a popular fascination as those surrounding genetic technologies. Unequal access to preimplantation diagnosis could give some individuals the opportunity to select children with more advantageous predispositions.

In this article, I present what I believe to be the core of Jürgen Habermas’s views on the morality, ethics, and regulation of emerging genetic and reproductive technologies in his book The Future of Human Nature.

The human being’s mastery of itself, on which the self is founded, practically always involves the annihilation of the subject in whose service that mastery is maintained, because the substance which is mastered, suppressed, and disintegrated by self-preservation is nothing other than the living entity.

The term “ectogenesis” has been around for about a century now, and it is generally understood as the development of embryos and fetuses outside a uterus. In this sense, all in vitro fertilization (IVF) is ectogenesis, but in vitro development can only proceed to a certain point, at which time human embryos are then either implanted in the attempt to achieve a pregnancy, frozen for that use in the future, used in research, or discarded.

In his article “Research Priorities and the Future of Pregnancy” in this issue of CQ, Timothy Murphy evaluates some of the arguments I advanced in an earlier publication, “The Moral Imperative for Ectogenesis.

There must be few philosophical projects more serious than Jürgen Habermas’s lifelong effort to realize the lofty universalist ambitions of the Enlightenment in his communicative theory of rational discourse and deliberative democracy.