Genetic Knowledge: a Gift or a Curse?

Introduction

It is not without a reason that the current epoch is called the molecular era. New knowledge about the mechanisms of human inheritance not only calls into question the boundaries of what is permissible in genetic research and manipulation, but also requires a critical reassessment of the systems of morality and law prevailing in society.

The proclamation of the molecular era implies that the previous historical period in the life of humankind should be called the pre-molecular era. Meanwhile, the pre-molecular era should be divided into two periods: archaic and modern. The archaic period features the formation of the worldviews and value systems characterized by the absolutization of heredity. However, the modernity that replaced it counterbalanced the importance of heredity according to the influence of variability, thereby lifting the ‘genetic curse’ from some people, and moderating the claims of some other people to ‘genetic superiority’. The worldviews and value systems produced by modernity – which are spreading in successfully modernizing societies – do not annihilate the archaic worldview, but have to coexist and compete with their predecessors. The situation of postmodernity occurs when the archaic and the modern overcome the open enmity and move on to peaceful coexistence, mutual influence and even interpenetration. The discovery of genes and genetic mechanisms of heredity, as well as the scientific description of the causes of genetic variation, became a challenge both for the values of the archaic and for the ideals of the modernity (McGuire et al., 2020). Each of the systems offered its own set of responses, each generating its own prohibitions and prescriptions, which are embodied in religion, bioethics and law in different ways. However, even greater importance is acquired by all sorts of combinations of the archaic and the modernity. Some of them represent the result of socio-political compromises, and others constitute the result of the postmodernist worldview prevalent in contemporary minds.

Blood and inheritance in the archaic era

The first historical period, called the archaic (from the Ancient Greek ἀρχαῖος meaning ancient), represents a time when the social life and human minds were totally dominated by tradition. Here, the very concept of tradition is organically linked to the concept of inheritance – both biological and social.

Knowing nothing about the molecular mechanisms of inheritance, people were perfectly aware of the fact of its existence and presence in everyday life. It might even be said that the experience of relations with blood relatives is the starting point of social formation. The experience of communicating with parents, then with other relatives, and then with children, gradually expanded and projected onto the rest of the world. The implications of such phrases as ‘Mother Earth’, ‘Holy Father’ or ‘…blood runs through my veins’ – which filled the mythopoetic pictures of the world and magical practices with meaning – have come down to us from ancient times. Phrases like ‘gypsy blood runs through my veins’, ‘blue blood flowed through his veins’, or ‘he suddenly heard the call of the blood’, although belonging to the sphere of everyday consciousness and reaching us through literary images, were nevertheless clear and meaningful long before the emergence of genetics.

Biological inheritance precedes social inheritance. This is the manifestation of the ancient intuition perceiving everything social as a continuation of the natural, i.e., the biological. The initial form of social relations – tribal relations – places kinship in the very center, organizing morality and law, power and property, worldview and values, around it. It is not a mere coincidence that kinship is defined as blood relationship (or consanguinity): the ancient idea that a child receives its blood from the parents (from the father – through his semen, and from the mother – directly) had the same meaning as the scientific theories explaining the mechanisms of genetic inheritance today. The concern for procreation firmly occupied the central place in the system of values of the tribal society. The feeling underlying that concern has not faded away even today, although the era of social rationalization and individualization has put it to the test.

Meanwhile, the theory of inheritance from father to son of such personal qualities as courage, intelligence, honor and dignity imparted legitimacy to the institutions of inheritance of a social status, and – along with it – power (authority), property, rights, duties, claims and obligations. The glorious deeds of fathers allowed their sons to occupy a higher position in society than those whose parents had not gained glory for themselves. The descendants of those who brought disgrace and dishonor upon themselves and their families became outcasts, and were subjected to various forms of stigmatization. Thus, the idea of punishing children for the wrongdoings of their parents, or the idea of the need to recompense for other people’s sins occupied a significant place in the archaic consciousness. Genetic mechanisms had yet to be discovered, but the concepts of consanguinity and the resulting rights and obligations had been forming a system of values since time immemorial.

The very fact of human birth and accompanying circumstances was perceived as fateful, encouraging a person to think in terms of the will of supernatural forces. Their entire future was predetermined by who their parents were (free people or slaves, rich or poor, noble or ‘rootless’), and by who they were to their parents (firstborns or favorites, legitimate heirs or illegitimate offspring), as well as – of course – by the epoch and the society they were to live in. Ancient Greek philosophers, undoubtedly, challenged the public consciousness by daring to lead a lifestyle that assumed only one type of dependence – dependence on reason. Rejecting everything they acquired ‘by inheritance’, those lovers of wisdom performed actions measuring them only by the standard of the good that they determined for themselves.

One of the greatest works of world literature – the drama Oedipus Rex by Sophocles – fully reflects the whole importance of blood relations in an archaic society (Sophocles, 1990). It is clearly kinship that underlies the conceptual structure within the framework of which the concepts of law and fate, chance and necessity, freedom and responsibility are correlated in the archaic consciousness. The knowledge of consanguinity comes to the protagonist (and the entire Theban society) along with knowledge of the most terrible crime – patricide. King Oedipus kills his father without knowing it, because he – just like the biblical Moses, as well as many other protagonists of legends and myths – had been removed from the family and handed over to chance (fate, gods). The centrality of the fact of birth and kinship in the value system and in the worldview of the archaic society is very accurately expressed in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (Sophocles, 1977):

“I, Oedipus, Oedipus, damned in his birth, in his marriage damned,

Damned in the blood he shed with his own hand,” and

“Let every man in mankind’s frailty

Consider his last day; and let none

Presume on his good fortune until he find

Life, at his death, a memory without pain”.

Lévi-Strauss in his Structural Anthropology highlights that “the biological family is ubiquitous in human society. But what confers upon kinship its socio-cultural character is not what it retains from nature, but, rather, the essential way in which it diverges from nature. A kinship system does not consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals. It exists only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a real situation” (Lévi-Strauss, 1963, p. 50).

In an archaic society, a right is inseparable from law [legislation], and law can be either a codified custom, or the will of the legislator formulated and written down on paper. Thus, justice becomes a derivative of consanguinity. In this instance, a right [law] is determined based on the theory of justice, it does not yet become the object of a separate philosophical reflection. Two types of justice – egalitarian and distributive – fit fairly well into the logic and sociology of the archaic class-based society. At a time when the archaic period was still continuing, but with modernity already upon its heels, society remained class-based, but the concept of social justice was already emerging. This was a sign of weakening of the meaning of birth – heredity was giving way to variability.

Falling away from the ‘wheel of births’ in modernity

The situation changed with the onset of the modern era. Modernity brought about a new understanding of the phenomenon of inheritance and developed new ideas about the role and value of heredity. Even a moderate variant treating two factors of natural selection – heredity and variability – ‘on equal terms’ allows assuming that an individual is not dominated by either the unique biological features of their parents, or by their social, cultural or ethno-confessional background (Lysenko, 2001). According to the narrative of modernity, the things that a person achieves in life and the place they occupy in society depend on themselves, whatever the circumstances of their birth. Some people are talented by nature, while some other people are born with average abilities (although in both cases it depends on a combination of circumstances, rather than on their parents). Nevertheless, the natural talent needs to be developed, while patience and perseverance can compensate for the lack of talent (Simonton, 2008; Shenk, 2011).

It is commonly understood that the ethics of modernity is formed on a foundation already prepared by ancient philosophers and devotees of the Christian religion. The ideas and concepts of these predecessors underwent a long evolution in order to lead the late Middle Ages into the birth of a humanistic system of values, which were then were proclaimed as the ideals of the Enlightenment. Both the reflections of ancient philosophers and the insights of medieval devotees contributed to the destruction of the archaic idea that one is born a human being [a person]. It was replaced by an alternative assumption: one is not born a human being [a person], one becomes a human being [a person]. Although Fyodor Kozyrev pointed out the lack of connection between such ideals of the Enlightenment as liberty and equality with the values of the Christian doctrine (Kozyrev, 2015), this connection undoubtedly exists. Nowadays, the Christian understanding of equality might be different from the political and legal interpretation of this concept prevailing in the era of modernity. However, before proclaiming the equality of all before the law in the 18th century, it was necessary to hear about the equality in Christ centuries before that. Suffice to recall the famous phrase from the Gospel, where ‘there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all’ (Bible, 1970). With this phrase, put into the mouth of Saint Paul the Apostle, Christianity abolished the previously immutable laws of the lineage, and rejected the worldview that explained the substantive mechanisms of inheritance inherent in archaism.

No less revolutionary were the speeches of the ancient philosophers who placed reason above any determinants – first and foremost, above the main one that could be called the determinant of birth. The Latin saying Sapere aude! (‘Have the courage to use your own intelligence!’) was considered by Immanuel Kant to be the motto of the Enlightenment. However, it can reasonably be called the motto of the philosophy of Socrates, and all the subsequent schools that emerged under his influence. When applied at the level of common reason, the Socratic method reveals the possibility of a free-thinking person to determining their own futures by making the right decisions. The same conclusion was reached by many others, including the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and the slave Epictetus, both recognised as teachers despite their very birth circumstances.

The philosophical doctrine affirming the omnipotence of reason that is capable of giving its owners liberty and equality, as well as the religious doctrine of the equality of all Christians before God, did not have a significant impact on the foundations and customs of the traditional societies which continued to exist in the environment of archaic thinking. It would take centuries for these two concepts to come together in a new worldview and a new system of social relations followed by the emergence of new values. Collectivism would give way to individualism, criticism and historicism, while customs were increasingly subordinated to supposedly moral reasoning according to a belief system that proclaimed individual human personality as its highest value.

No less interesting changes were brought about by modernity to the notion of the nature and the essence of law [right]. Rather than being conditioned by someone’s will, Law [right] is now expressed in an original and primary act of legislation. The understanding of its nature and essence, typical for Roman law, emerged, existed and developed in line with the archaic concept of ownership and inheritance. The right of inheritance in an archaic society was conditioned by the mechanism of transferring the rights to possession along with the blood, while the very fact of birth was interpreted within the context of realization of someone’s will, be it the will of the father, the will of other relatives who make the decision about the choice of the bride for marriage, or even the will of the gods. However, within the worldview, all these connections, decisions and laws of inheritance were not interpreted in the context of the idea of law [right], which was the product of the ancient Roman and medieval European judicial practices. Therefore, it was in no way connected with the laws of nature or fate, but was interpreted exclusively as the result of someone’s arbitrary [volitional] decisions and agreements. “Law is not simply the sum total of that which has been decreed and enacted; it is that which originally arranges things. It is ‘ordering order’ (ordo ordinans), not ‘ordered order’ (ordo ordinatus). The perfect concept of law presupposes without doubt a commandment affecting individual wills. But this commandment does not create the idea of law and justice, it is subject to this idea; it puts the idea into executio n, though the execution must not be confused with the justification of the idea of law as such” (Cassirer, 1951, p. 240).

The meeting of the idea of law [right] with the worldview where an important role is played by the laws governing this world (God, fate, natural continuity) took place only within the framework of the Enlightenment.

‘The perfect concept of law presupposes without doubt a commandment affecting individual wills. But this commandment does not create the idea of law and justice, it is subject to this idea; it puts the idea into execution, though the execution must not be confused with the justification of the idea of law as such... In enacting his various positive laws the legislator follows an absolutely universally valid norm which is exemplary and binding for his own as well as for every other will’ (Cassirer, 1951, p. 240).

All of that is most directly related to modernity, where the modernist understanding of the world requires to harmonize all regulatory and legislative acts with the fundamental concept of human rights. The entire theory of modern law can hence be asserted as the concentrated expression of the concept of natural law, universal and inalienable human rights.

The intertwinement of the archaic and the modern in postmodernism

The continuing popularity of ancient fortune-telling and prophetic practices in the modern era remains a mystery to researchers into mass consciousness. One might think that acquaintance with scientific explanations of natural phenomena, even those acquired within the framework of a general school education, should result in ‘breaking the magic spell’ of the world and squeezing out the ancient magical knowledge into the purely fictional spheres of fairy tales for children or the fantasy genre. Nevertheless, many superstitions demonstrate not only the miracle of their survivability, but even the capabilities to mount a counterattack. Sociologists, psychologists, and science theorists provide a whole variety of explanations for the popularity of what is commonly called parascience, anti-science, or pseudoscience.

All the aforementioned types of knowledge, as well as the practices based on them, usually attach great importance to their antiquity and authenticity. The simple idea that the performance of a magic spell will be more effective the more accurately the corresponding ritual is observed, and the less such a rite/ritual contains anything alien to itself or connected with modernity, seems simple and convincing. However, life turns out to be more complicated: contemporary magical consciousness demonstrates an enthusiasm to use scientific discoveries for purposes far from those originally intended. The most obvious example is the use of computers and other IT technologies in astrological calculations.

One of the most impressive instances of the symbiosis between the prescientific archaic practices and modern scientific knowledge in the life of the present-day societies is the popular Japanese belief about the role of blood types in the formation of key human qualities, and the link between the blood type and such important features of individuals as their character, temperament, intelligence (Ando et al., 2002).

The theories and teachings about the influence of numbers (numerology) or hand lines (palmistry) on human fate emerged in ancient times, when any person was able to look at lines and features on the palm or count objects. However, blood types were discovered a little over a century ago – i.e., at the dawn of the molecular era. They were identified and described using the means and methods of science – therefore, they appeared to be an integral part of scientific knowledge. Not only back then, but today as well, special medical devices developed by engineers and technologists are required to determine the blood type in each specific case. However, following its acquisition, the knowledge itself turned out to be suitable for application far beyond the boundaries of science, as part of practices whose origins are outright magical (Nakamine, 2017).

The whole world knows about the scientific and technological achievements of Japan, due to which it has been perceived as a technologically advanced country for over a century. Several successful modernizations have contributed to Japan’s ongoing firm position among the world leaders in high-tech industries. At the same time, the blood type theory developed by analogy with the ancient magical and astrological teachings – although using the data from science – has a significant impact on all spheres of social life without exception. There exist entire communities of followers of this theory, some of whose adherents can be described as fanatical. However, many Japanese are inclined to consider blood types when it comes to employment, promotion, the choice of a life partner, or a tutor for their children. Some experts even use the term ‘obsession’ to describe the belief that the blood type determines the fate of a person, and may influence those who happen to be around. In cultural terms, a lot of books are published describing the physiological and behavioural features of people based on their blood types, as well as films, shows and anime devoted to this issue.

This is just one of many examples demonstrating how the latest knowledge may be used by an archaic consciousness to achieve its own goals, rather than for the intended purpose of such knowledge. As an indicator of the peculiarities of the molecular structure of living matter, the blood type is separated from the rest of the body of special knowledge, as well as from the conditions of scientific knowledge operation, use and interpretation. Thus, objects discovered and explored using scientific methods are endowed with magical properties other than according to the principles of genetics or science in general.

Reconfiguration of society in the era of genetic knowledge

Genetic knowledge has significantly changed the life of people and society. It would be no exaggeration to say that the information about genes and the related knowledge has revolutionarised many common social practices associated with inheritance. One of the key social institutions where the influence of molecular biology became most noticeable was the institution of family. In archaic societies, whole systems for ensuring the purity of inheritance developed, the essence of which boiled down to significant restriction of the freedom of women with the elimination of any risk of contacts with strangers. Customs prescribing wearing clothes that hide the face and body as much as possible, bans on going out without being accompanied by a male family member, prevention of any communication with the opposite sex are still valid for all women in some Muslim countries (many people in the regions where the majority of the population traditionally follows Islam also see this as an ideal of behaviour). However, here it should be acknowledged that the desire to control the transmission of kinship in course of biological reproduction has been characteristic of other cultural and religious traditions, albeit to varying extents. Meanwhile, the current genetic studies demonstrate that these measures, despite all their severity, did not always allow the set goal to be achieved. Even under conditions of total control or under the threat of severe punishment, people by no means are always able to follow the strict requirements of the archaic social order. This results in various deviations of actual reproductive behaviour from social norms and socially approved patterns.

Genealogical DNA tests aimed at finding or verifying ancestral genealogical relationships entered our life fairly recently. But how dramatic are sometimes the stories when the results of such tests do not confirm the fact of paternity or even kinship in general. Some people find out that they were mistakenly given to wrong parents in the maternity ward, while some fathers discover that the child whom they had considered to be their own was born as a result of the wife’s infidelity. Fates are inexorably determined, families are torn apart, the whole way of life changes – even for those who did not want to change it at all. These processes are superimposed on other ones – social rationalization and social individualization – adding new factors of influence to the relations between individuals, as well as contributing to the evolution of the institution itself.

The impact of genetic knowledge on society is not limited to the institution of family. Almost all social systems, structures and institutions are affected by what Helga Novotny and Giuseppe Testa call the molecular gaze on life (Nowotny & Testa, 2011, p. 1). These new optics – associated not only with knowledge about genes, but also about other cellular and molecular formations, genetic profiles, etc. – make the processes of interindividual, intragroup and intergroup interactions visible. The possibility to know much more about life than before brought about the temptation to actively interfere with its natural course. Moreover, the fact that the mechanisms of living things functioning and the reproduction of life as such became visible, had a system-forming influence on social discourse, and, consequently, on the continuing formation of the basic value system. The correspondence of the accepted norms to these basic values is an essential aspect of bioethics and legal regulation of genetic research. At the same time, the values themselves also become structurally and substantively dependent on genetic knowledge.

Novotny and Testa make a good point saying that one of the main vectors of the genetic knowledge influence on society is that it is ‘making things visible’. They use the example of an advertising campaign for a Philips 3D ultrasound scanner for prenatal diagnosis with the following slogan: ‘Technology should be as simple as the box it comes in’. The viewer watching the advertisement first sees the conventional two-dimensional image in shades of grey in which only the gynaecologist can discern the relevant picture (although even the gynaecologist cannot easily make out the contours of the foetus). This is followed by an image processed using some kind of technology, where anyone can see the foetus, although this image is far from the usual pictures of everyday life.

Finally, the third stage comes when the three-dimensional image on the screen of the device allows seeing the child’s head and body as if there were no mother’s body hiding it from the naked eye.

‘Then, – Novotny and Testa point out, – the third image delivers the advertisement’s promise – simplicity. This is the 3D ultrasound scan that uses an algorithm to transform the meaningless segments of the grey surfaces into the familiar 3D image of a baby sucking its thumb. The image ‘speaks’ for itself; the baby’s head is now recognizable even for laypeople’ (Nowotny & Testa, 2011, p. 2).

The authors recall D’Alembert’s Dream –
the famous work by Denis Diderot (1986) – in which the author claims that it is enough for him to see life appearing in an ordinary egg to topple all the creationist arguments of theologians. To clarify consciousness is to free the world from a magic spell: this is both one of the intentions and consequences of the Enlightenment. This is what gives hope for the profound transformative effect that genomic knowledge can bring about.

Randomness and predictability of genetic interference

In his book Representing and Intervening, Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking (1983) demonstrated that these two concepts equally characterize the two sides of the process of scientific knowledge [cognition]. Representing without intervening will never provide the knowledge needed by science. Different philosophical, scientific, and methodological schools have differently distributed the functions, the power and the order of these two aspects of research. In present-day genetics, and in the accompanying bioethical and legal studies, the question has arisen how to limit the intervening, or at least make it as safe as possible.

Although genetic knowledge creates tremendous opportunities for intervening, this intervention does not appear to be predictable. Research aimed at saving the lives of patients, which led to the discovery of antibiotics, had an impact on Europeans (and, thereafter, on the rest of humanity) which was equally large in scale, but much more distant in time. This has impacted on lifestyle changes in rationalized Western societies, where the decreasing desire to have as many children as possible partly due to the sharp decrease in child mortality and the ever-increasing possibilities of birth control. Families with one child or two children have become more common along with the number of people who plan never to have a family. Thus, the countries with the most highly developed technology and economy are those whose rapidly aging population is being increasingly replenished by migrants.

At the same time, in the traditional societies of Asian, African, and Latin American countries, the availability of antibiotics together with other advances in medicine, has resulted in an unprecedented increase in population, whose cultural roots may still lie in the pre-molecular era. Meanwhile the long-term consequences of genetic knowledge collection and application are yet to be seen.

“…the familiar distinctions – Novotny and Testa point out, – between knowledge and application, between science and technology – are outdated. Under the hegemony of the molecular glance, knowledge has become action. Today the fact is that understanding life means changing life. The molecular life sciences’ glance from within has replaced the external view – the famous ‘view from nowhere’” (Nowotny & Testa, 2011, pp. 5–6).

While trying to understand the possibilities and boundaries of modern genetics, some anthropologists reflect on how rational it would be to interfere with natural phenomena in the course of human genome sequencing. Even Goethe reproached Galileo for the fact that the mathematical natural science created by the latter, unlike Aristotelian physics, did not explain nature, but only set out to conquer it. In accordance with the Bacon’s famous dictum ‘Knowledge is Power’, such knowledge is invariably intended for using and transforming in one’s own interests. However, interests have always been substantially different from ideals. Thus, genetic research should be subject to legal regulation for protecting human rights, including the right to information about the dangers and possible consequences for health in case of participation in an experiment.

As is commonly known, the beginning of genetic research regulation was marked by the Nuremberg Code (BMJ, 1996). Article 1 of the Code prohibits interfering with the natural course of a person’s life without the voluntary consent of such person based on full knowledge of the potential consequences: ‘The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential’. Russian legislators have reflected this principle in Part 2 Article 21 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, as well as in Articles 32 and 43 of the Fundamentals of Legislation of the Russian Federation ‘On Citizens’ Health Protection’ where some further specific details are added:

‘Any biomedical research involving a person as a subject can be carried out only after obtaining such person’s written consent. A citizen cannot be forced to participate in biomedical research... When obtaining consent for biomedical research, the citizen must be provided with the information about the goals, the methods, the side effects, the potential risks, the duration and the expected results of the research. A citizen has the right to refuse to participate in research at any stage’.

The Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights adopted on 11 November 1997 by the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization specifies the above-mentioned principle of the Nuremberg Code in terms of genetic research. Among other things, it touches upon the value of biological diversity and the interpretation thereof.

‘Bearing in mind also the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity of 5 June 1992 and emphasizing in that connection that the recognition of the genetic diversity of humanity must not give rise to any interpretation of a social or political nature which could call into question ‘the inherent dignity and (...) the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’, in accordance with the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’.

This provision is extremely important, as, in addition to the need to protect human rights, there exists another object of protection – the gene pool of humanity. It was only the development of genetic science that made it possible to realize the scale of the danger of interference with natural processes at the molecular level. However, at the same time arose many justifications of the impossibility of imposing a total ban on such research. ‘We have never done anything’, – David Baltimore, a biologist and former president of the California Institute of Technology, said, – ‘that will change the genes of the human race, and we have never done anything that will have effects that will go on through the generations’ (Regalado, 2018). In 2017, the international science and research community, led by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM), defined the conditions that need to be met before editing the human embryo genome meant for implantation. One of these conditions is that DNA sequences obtained as a result of editing must be already prevalent in the population and must not carry any known risk of disease.

The aforementioned requirement voiced by the NASEM actually forbids any innovation in the sphere of human genome. The probability and feasibility of codifying this requirement in legislation without discontinuing any research is a separate question. Moreover, modern researchers are discovering more and more new facts indicating that the human genome evolves under the influence of completely random circumstances, and it is not within the human power to keep it immutable (Moraes & Góes, 2016; Shapiro & Noble, 2021).

Today, when the SARS-CoV-2 virus has brought innumerable adversities to the entire population of our planet, most people view viruses only as something evil. At the same time, scientists and researchers are increasingly realizing the high importance of the functions of viruses in nature and the significant role they may have played in human evolution. According to Kojima, Kamada, and Parrish (2021),

“Union of genomes from discrete biological entities is a major engine of genetic diversity. Fusion of gametes, each bearing a set of recombinant chromosomes, is the immediate source of the genetic material that uniquely identifies each human. Taking a wider viewpoint, much of a human genome can be recognized to have been acquired from a source other than modern humans”.

This example clearly demonstrates the growing difficulties of determining the possible consequences, even if assuming that today’s interventions into the genetic structures of individuals are absolutely safe for such individuals’ personal health. At the same time, any addition of foreign insertions into an individual’s genes appears to involves random and essentially uncontrollable process, upon which the illusion of safety – or, at least, of the possibility of purposefully influencing the human genome – is based. However, technologies such as CRISPR are already demonstrating an ability to transform an uncontrollable [unmanageable] process into a controllable [manageable] one (Noman, Aqeel, & He, 2016). While the use of such technologies is aimed at improving the health of certain individuals, its effects in relation to the human race as a whole remain uncontrollable. According to some authors, it is with this question that bioethics should primarily concern itself about at the current stage (Zhang, Wen, & Guo, 2014).

According to the anthropologist Paul Rabinow (1992), the object to be known – i.e., the human genome – will inevitably become known in such a way that it can be changed. This approach fully involves what philosophers call instrumental rationality, which is characterised by the transformation of values into ends, and ends into means. The representation of the object is done in a way ensuring the most effective intervention, as this is how the mutual conversion of knowledge and power is achieved. Instrumental reason or instrumental rationality is the modern way of using descriptive knowledge as a means for transforming the world. Jürgen Habermas in his work entitled ‘The Theory of Communicative Action’ opposed this type of rationality to another one, more ancient and perhaps more human, which he called communicative rationality.

‘If we start from the non-communicative employment of knowledge in teleological action, we make a prior decision (Vorentscheidung) for the concept of cognitive-instrumental rationality that has, through empiricism, deeply marked the self-understanding (Selbstverstundnis) of the modern era. It carries with it connotations of successful self-maintenance made possible by informed disposition over, and intelligent adaptation to, conditions of a contingent environment’ (Habermas, 2007).

Thus, communicative rationality, together with instrumental rationality, creates an effective decision-making system that balances the various goals, values and meanings generated in social practices.

Conclusion

The theory of communicative action lays the conceptual foundations of bioethics which need to be taken into account when building a system of administrative and legal regulation as well as socio-communicative regulation of genetic knowledge development. The distinction between communicative and instrumental rationality traces itself as far back as the Kantian doctrine of practical reason and the categorical imperative. Kant’s ethics contains one of the interpretations of the categorical imperative forbidding treating others solely as a means to achieve one’s own ends. This is exactly what characterizes the instrumental rationality which prompts seeing only a potential to serve actual means in all things existent.

It is not a mere coincidence that the main criterion of success within the framework of instrumental rationality is the concept of efficiency. Unlimited (unrestricted in any way) instrumental rationality is capable of resulting in moral degradation of society and in maximum dehumanization of the existence of human beings as such. That is why instrumental rationality must be subordinated to and supplemented by another kind of rationality – communicative rationality. Communicative rationality presupposes the presence of two entities (parties) and a dialogue between them, which prevents instrumentalization of interindividual, intragroup and intergroup interactions. Normal communication is supported not only by ends, but also values, on which basis the transformation of any into means can be reliably prevented. It is extremely important to take this conceptual structure into account when making laws and performing other actions aimed at creating a system for regulating genetic research. In this connection, it would certainly be advisable to start taking this into account already at the level of declarations adopted by the global and regional communities of legislators, researches and public figures.

Thus, we see that it is impossible to choose one of the two drivers of natural selection – heredity or variability – as the main value. The human genome is naturally affected by each of these factors, which makes potential interventions either proactive, or reactive. Proactive interventions are aimed at changing the human genome, while reactive interventions are generally aimed at removing the causes of ‘genetic damage’, such as, for example, random mutations resulting in genetic diseases of some individuals. While reactive interventions as such are undoubtedly permissible and even desirable (if indeed the absence of any negative consequences is guaranteed), proactive interventions aimed at improving the human genome need to be reliably excluded today by means of legal regulation. Here it is accepted that proactive interventions may also become acceptable in the future if their influence on the genome can be reliably controlled and predicted. But even then, each such ‘innovation’ should be based on the results of a broad public discussion, multi-stage expert review and other means of communicative rationality.