Essay on humans, animals, and machines

[Pranav Merchant]

Wherever I turn, the popular media, scientists and even fellow philosophers are telling me that I’m a machine or a beast. My ethics can be illuminated by the behavior of termites. My brain is a sloppy computer with a flicker of consciousness and the illusion of free will. I’m anything but human.

While it would take more time and space than I have here to refute these views, I’d like to suggest why I stubbornly continue to believe that I’m a human being — something more than other animals, and essentially more than any computer.

The temptation to reduce the human to the subhuman has been around for a long time.

Let’s begin with ethics. Many organisms carry genes that promote behavior that benefits other organisms. The classic example is ants: every individual insect is ready to sacrifice itself for the colony. As Edward O. Wilson explained in a recent essay for The Stone, some biologists account for self-sacrificing behavior by the theory of kin selection, while Wilson and others favor group selection. Selection also operates between individuals: “within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.” Wilson is cautious here, but some “evolutionary ethicists” don’t hesitate to claim that all we need in order to understand human virtue is the right explanation — whatever it may be — of how altruistic behavior evolved.

read the rest here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/anything-but-human/?hp

[Tim Gier]

The author of the article may be uncomfortable with the implications of a naturalist evolutionary account for the basis of human morality, but the doesn't mean either that such an account is wrong nor that anyone else ought to be uncomfortable with it's implications. Human beings have survived and thrived because we evolved with the ability to consider the wants and needs of others. Our "good behavior" has a biological basis and an evolutionary payoff. We are the sort of creature who feels good and is good when we are doing good. Why that reality would constitute a threat to moral action, I have no idea.