Dipl.-jur. Lioba Ilona Luisa Welling

Chair of Civil Law, Philosophy of Law and Medical Law

Curriculum Vitae:

PhD project:

Genetic Enhancement. Limits of Justification Resources of the Secular Constitutional State?

The dynamic development of the life sciences increasingly subjects even human nature to the possibilities of technical intervention. This process, apparently aiming at an “end of nature” (Anthony Giddens), gains a new dimension through the option of “enhancing” interventions into the genetic endowment of man. Because of its particular relevance for the self-conception of the community, this development has provoked ethical, political and increasingly also legal debates in which profound normative dissents come to the fore. Here, particularly religious arguments or arguments feeding on religious matters attempt to give reasons for the strict limits of the availability human nature.

The work outlined here is of a legal and legal philosophical nature. As a jurisprudential analysis, it will firstly discuss the legitimacy of measures of genetic enhancement or of “liberal positive” eugenics, respectively, and it will investigate lex ferenda control options, also using comparative legal references. It will be proceeded on the assumption that a liberal constitutional state such as the Federal Republic of Germany guarantees a prima facie preference of individual civil liberties, thus requiring that a full or partial prohibition of genetic enhancement – in particular if it is to be implemented by means of criminal law – be justified within the medium of legislation.

Within this scope, my dissertation project, in its legal philosophical dimensions, aims at a question that lies at the centre of the current relationship of religion and politics, at least from a legal perspective: is it possible to justify the sacrosanctity of the human genome’s naturalness with arguments that can be couched in legal terms within the scope of a secular, religiously “neutral” legal order, or do the justification resources of the secular constitutional state reach a systematic limit here? Can it be assumed that legal orders understanding themselves as strictly secular are “programmed” for permissiveness with regard to possible interventions into the human genome, and that the idea of a plainly inaccessible natural substratum of man can only be implemented and enforced by a state that does not fully renounce a religious transcendental entrenchment of law? Do these findings address a deficit in the theory of political liberalism (for example, John Rawls), a theory that, due to the requirements of public justification, aims to strictly bar religious and otherwise transcendental contents from being justification resources for state-set norms and even if such contents are translated into “profane” semantics, into functional equivalents of religious patterns of argument?

The dissertation project sees itself as contributing to the field of research of “Normativity”. It is therefore associated with Project A3, Prof. Dr. Thomas Gutmann, and hopes it will also be able to contribute to Project A4, Prof. Dr. Ulrich Willems. Furthermore, there are several relations to the field of research of “Staging”. In addition, the dissertation is thematically associated with the research group “Theoretical foundations of the justification of norms in medical ethics and biopolitics”.

Research interests:

• Associated member of the research group “Theoretical foundations of the justification of norms in medical ethics and biopolitics”

 Function within the Cluster/Membership in Projekts/Study Groups:

• Member of the study group Multiple Modernities
• Member of the study group Charting the Boundaries of the Religious Field

Conference contributions:

• „Limited Sources of Normative Justification in the Secular Constitutional State? On the Role of Religiously Motivated Arguments in Bioethical Debates”, 2^nd Annual Graduate Conference „Norms in Conflict“, Cluster of Excellence „The Formation of Normative Orders”, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, December 3-5, 2010.

Publications:

• Limited Sources of Normative Justification in the Secular Constitutional State? On the Role of Religiously Motivated Arguments in Bioethical Debates, in: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik, volume 16 (2011), edited by Ludger Honnefelder and Dieter Sturma, De Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 41-63.

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