Abstract
This edited collection grows out of ongoing research on morphogenic societies and the challenges they pose for humanity. The contributors are concerned with understanding and evaluating post-humanism, trans-humanism and anti-humanism and their often-dehumanising consequences in practice and in social theory. Transhumanism is concerned with technologies, practices and bodily modifications that alter and allegedly enhance our capacities and quality of life. They pose important practical and ethical questions, not least as regards issues of equity, given the huge inequalities in access to such technologies. These developments and associated concerns extend to artificial intelligence and possible non-human but intelligent entities. In what sense, if any, could they be intelligent? Could robots and other forms of artificial intelligence ever achieve personhood and the special value that goes with that? These matters require us to reflect on what it is to be human, what it is to be a person, what is distinctive about them and what gives them worth. While all the authors defend humanism from its mischaracterisation by poststructuralism, their answers to these questions differ.
The first three papers by Archer, Porpora and Donati concentrate on the nature of the human and what it is about humanity that is of value. As such, a prime target is anti-humanism as an academic current made fashionable by post-structuralism and postmodernism, though these are dealt with only briefly as the authors prioritise their defences of humanism. Archer argues that our bodies provide a ‘necessary anchorage for “selfhood” without providing the sufficient conditions for “personhood”’ (p. 12). She emphasises the importance for babies of involvement in nature and practical activity as well as social relations for their acquisition of a sense of self and then personhood. She thus counters the scholastic bias of many academic accounts that attribute these developments wholly to language acquisition. However, language is important for fostering reflexivity. What is also important for personhood is the development of concerns, including attachments to significant others, and commitments to various practices and objects, which become recurrent foci of thought and feeling. They matter to us, though they are not necessarily good. This is a ‘thicker’ concept of personhood than ones based simply on the possession of a first-person perspective, as propounded by Lynne Rudder Baker, though thinner than Christian Smith’s conception of personhood with its requirements for specific moral qualities (Baker, 2013; Smith, 2010).
Doug Porpora’s discussion of personhood centres on the concept of ‘thou-ness’. Following Nagel, any being (not necessarily human) that is also an ‘I’ through being capable of a first-person perspective is a ‘thou’, rather than an ‘it’. In other words, a thou is a centre of consciousness, and not merely a nexus of social forces as in poststructuralism. But he considers personhood to be the preserve of humans on the basis of an enhanced form of ‘thou-ness’, enabled by language, which allows us to speak to others and to ourselves, and in turn to be capable of caring about others and moral deliberation. 1 But even caring behaviour need not be evidence of personhood unless it is motivated by caring emotions. Again, on this view, we are not born but become persons. However, for Porpora, those individuals who, like Donald Trump, appear to lack such emotions are nevertheless still to be regarded as persons, albeit possibly ‘fractured’ ones, in Archer’s terms. He leaves open the possibility that non-human hardware such as computers might be developed that produce the emergent effects that we call emotions and meet his criteria for personhood. In this case, the qualities of humanity would not be restricted to humans.
Pierpaulo Donati considers this approach to be too dyadic, missing the fact that individuals can act as ‘we’s’ in webs of relations. In keeping with his relational approach, he argues that what is specifically human derives from social relations within a context of social networks. We become more human and ‘transcend’ ourselves when we generate ‘social relationships that support the flourishing of relational goods’ (p. 73). Donati sees this ability to transcend ourselves in this way as an enigma, unavailable to non-human animals and machines. For him, there can be no I-thou relations with non-human entities. He sees modernity as negating this capacity for transcendence through establishing a dualistic form of identity which is defined in relation to its negation, not least because of the replacement of ‘concrete inter-human relations with digital and virtual relations in which the qualities of the human are lost’ (p. 64). In response, he calls for a new relational paradigm to replace western individualism, in which actions will be evaluated in terms of our relations to one another and to the world. While there is some truth in the argument, there are also dangers of homogenising history in such ‘vast abstractions’, to borrow Edward Said’s phrase, for modernity has in other ways expanded possibilities for the kind of transcendence that Donati values.
In by far the longest contribution to the collection, Jamie Morgan provides an excellent overview and assessment of artificial intelligence (AI), developing a critique on both philosophical/scientific and moral/political grounds. He adapts from Searle a distinction between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ AI, in which the former is associated with machine performance of functions that are supposedly ‘intelligent’, and the latter with the question of what kind of entities direct functions, and hence what kinds of entities might be intelligent. The former is exemplified in the Turing Test, the latter by the Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ thought experiment. As Searle showed, successful simulation of intelligent behaviour need not require intelligence. Morgan shows how the dominance of the former focus has supported a largely uncritical acceptance of AI as a good thing, and as inevitable anyway, and hence one we therefore should accept. From an ontological view, the reduction of intelligence to certain functions computers can perform, allows the more basic questions of what thinking, intelligence, self-consciousness and reflexivity might be and what kind of entities are capable of these to be side-lined. The same goes for desire and emotions like compassion and fellow-feeling, and for the relational goods involved in interacting and cooperating with others that Archer, Porpora and Donati emphasise: where does AI stand in relation to these? Unless we consider these issues and their moral and political implications, transhumanist optimism about AI and other forms of modification of human life could take us in dangerous directions, for example towards eugenics.
All the authors acknowledge the dominance of morphogenesis over morphostasis in modern societies, but none more so than Andrea Maccarini, who is particularly concerned with the consequences of the acceleration of modern life and change in straining our species-specific temporalities, such as time for sleeping, understanding and appreciating, and grieving. If we are to flourish, we need to have time for these. The quality of experience may be further diminished through the ‘ongoing excess of possibilities of action and experience’ (p. 144); thus, the internet provides endless possibilities for self-interruption, preventing us concentrating and achieving a sense of flow, absorption and fulfilment. In such a context, relatively stable social ‘enclaves’ within modernity become all the more important.
Mark Carrigan focuses in on IT and big data and their role in the ‘evisceration of the human’: ‘“Big data” as a concept has served as a discursive shield through which a range of problematic assumptions about the social world and our knowledge of it have been advanced’ (p. 165). The technology of big data and the commercial interests that use it not only tracks our behaviour but shapes it. Human agency can thereby be reduced to behaviour that can be traced through such means, and the meaningful character of action may be lost in the process; indeed, big data evangelism as a cultural form implies a behaviourist view of social life. At the same time, Carrigan acknowledges that big data also brings benefits, both in daily life and as a resource for social scientists, where it need not be interpreted behaviouristically. Both sides need to be kept in mind.
Ismael Al-Amoudi examines the dehumanising effects of management and management studies. These include limiting flourishing, creating unnecessary hierarchies, replacing human judgement with automated procedures and denying workers security. Management increasingly tends to assume that people are (and should be) overwhelmingly self-interested. Although dehumanising work has been a feature of capitalism from the start it is now widely mystified in contemporary organisations by bogus claims to the contrary in their self-descriptions. Although Foucault has been highly influential in management studies, including among those who regard themselves as critics of management, his refusal of any concept of human nature disables critique. By contrast, Al-Amoudi shows how an adequate conception of the human can illuminate de-humanisation at work.
All in all, given the dominance of anti-humanism in recent social theory, the collection represents a long-overdue critical realist evaluation of this and of de-humanising features of everyday life. The contributors share basic ideas of critical realist philosophy, and generally assume readers are familiar with it, so its impact outside this audience, especially among those who are anti-humanists, may be limited. Readers who, like me, have little familiarity with science fiction literature and films may struggle with some of the many examples of these discussed in the chapters.
As most of the contributors note, transhumanist developments can be beneficial or harmful, so the kind of gung-ho technological optimism evident in businesses involved in it and often echoed in posthumanist literature should be robustly critiqued, as they are by several authors. What comes across most clearly is that we cannot avoid issues of how we characterise the human, the nature of personhood, intelligence and the components of flourishing, and how we should value them vis-a-vis other species or intelligent machines. This, as several contributors note, requires a deeper understanding of how social and cultural phenomena emerge from our biological affordances, modifying and developing our capacities and susceptibilities in the process. In view of this, however, I would suggest we need to pay more attention to human biology and child development than is evident in the collection.
The very ambiguity of the word ‘human’ can present a trap: it can mean either homo sapiens or a set of praiseworthy qualities such as benevolence, care and wisdom that we humans may or may not achieve, and perhaps certain frailties (‘only human’). It is tempting to collapse these two usages together by making desirable ways of being and living defining features of the human or indeed personhood, as several authors do in different ways and to different extents. It’s one thing to advocate these, but I wonder if it is necessary to incorporate them into such definitions rather than simply treating them as accounts of what it is to be virtuous and what enables this. Evil humans or persons are not ‘less human’, just bad ones, generally products of unfavourable upbringings and circumstances, and limited reflexivity. I also suggest that especially at this time of mass extinctions and destruction of our planetary life-support system, we need to pay more attention to other species and their particular capacities, susceptibilities and forms of intelligence. Many species are capable of suffering and flourishing and we are not the only species in which individuals care for others and have emotions; humanism does not have to embrace hard-line human exceptionalism and indifference to the rest of nature. Overall, however, the book provides a useful resource for countering anti-humanism and interrogating transhumanism.
