ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the desire to make our lives and ourselves ‘better’ is related to the ambition to enhance humanity in general. These not only ethically but also socially debatable endeavours were discussed by Jürgen Habermas in The Future of Human Nature, where he argued against biotechnical ‘liberal eugenics’ referring to Kierkegaard. However, his employment of Kierkegaardian existential thought raises various questions. The chapter assesses Habermas’s ‘philosophical intervention’ by taking three responses into account that his text received regarding his reference to Kierkegaard, two of which claim that Habermas’s argument is rather weak, while the third is less sceptical of his approach. Concluding that human resilience plays a role in the debate on how to cope with the social pressure to employ ‘liberal eugenics’, a different turn is taken to approach Kierkegaardian thinking for bioethics: the religious notion of ‘justification’ is assessed as way to create resilience as a response to the social pressure to become ‘better’.
