Conclusions

WHAT MAKES US HUMAN?

Over the millennia there have been many attempts to distinguish humans from other animals. Most markers build on our extraordinary cognitive capacity. Ancient Greeks emphasized our ability to speak and cook food.⁹⁹ Aristotle insisted that different forms of life have different kinds of souls. Only humans have "intellectual" souls and, as a result, the ability to reason.¹⁰⁰ Christians followed Aristotle in associating humanity with souls, but of the immortal Platonic kind. Descartes connected souls to cognition, arguing that animals, which lacked souls, could not think and were machine-like in their behavior. Modern thinkers like Kant and Hegel also emphasized reflexive capabilities. Kant proclaimed that "The fact that man can have the idea 'I' raises him infinitely above all the other beings living on earth."¹⁰¹

Some efforts at distinguishing humanity from "lesser" species build on the consequences of intelligence. Homo faber, the tool maker, is a case in point, and seemed to distinguish homo sapiens from earlier hominids as well as other animals. Karl Marx, for one, emphasized agency, tool making and the choices it conferred.¹⁰² Today we know that Neanderthals, once thought of as culturally inferior, made musical instruments as well as tools and interbred with humans.¹⁰³ Various monkeys and other animals fashion tools, and recent evidence suggests that border collies can develop 1,000 word vocabularies.¹⁰⁴ This distinction, like so many others, as David Hume maintained, must be considered one of degree and not of kind.¹⁰⁵ At best, there is a sliding scale of intelligence with humanity at the high end. Science fiction creates worlds with intelligent androids in which this gap is closed; humans are even surpassed in intelligence by machines. This challenge to human superiority would be threatening under any circumstances, but all the more so in the modern era where intelligence as a human marker has taken on new significance due to the progress of science.

This possibility has led some science fiction writers to turn to affect as the defining feature of human beings. It differentiates us from machines, unless or until computers and androids become advanced enough to develop feelings. The move to affect is questionable for another reason: it cannot distinguish humanity from other mammals who have emotions, display vitality and engage in free play. Psychologists recognize that humans and animals share what they call primary emotions (e.g., anger, fear, pleasure) but some insist that only humans have secondary emotions (e.g., honor, hope, nostalgia, shame).¹⁰⁶ Aristotle and some students of emotion insist that all emotions are cognitively mediated.¹⁰⁷ In practice, neither intelligence nor affect effectively differentiate us from animals and advanced, artificial life forms.

Over the millennia, many philosophers and writers have suggested that recognition of our mortality not only makes us human but shapes our behavior in ways it does not for other animals. The Greeks explained the striving for honor and standing as figurative means of escaping death.¹⁰⁸ More recently, Heidegger and Terror Management Theory advance related arguments.¹⁰⁹ Some philosophers and many science fiction and fantasy writers -- Tolkien for one -- oppose immortality on the grounds that it would deprive us of the ability to lead a meaningful and balanced life.¹¹⁰ Science fiction alleges that immortality would produce boredom, destructive envy, greater exploitation of the poor and a gerontocracy that would marginalize the young and forestall change. These novels and stories tap long-standing, if infrequently articulated, beliefs about the core constituents of humanity.

Religious people have a different answer: it is our relationship to god. Genesis says that we are made in his image and given control over other animals.¹¹¹ Christians add another marker: our potential to achieve salvation. These claims have diminishing credibility in the West, although secularized versions find wide resonance. Most of us believe we have the potential to live more ethical lives and that such striving is unique to the human race, on this planet, at least. For religious science fiction authors, immortality is a form of lèse majesté, a slighting of god and his authority. This claim is the latest iteration of the argument used by retrograde Christians to oppose a string of human improvements that include smallpox vaccination, organ transplants and stem cell research.

Secular objections to immortality are more interesting, although some of them in hark back to religious texts and their interpretation The concern about Boredom is a case in point. In chapter two, I noted the Jewish interpretation of the Garden of Eden myth; it understands curiosity, and with it, the desire to become master of our own fates, as such a powerful human drive that it could not be constrained by the deity. Sophocles offers a similar understanding in his treatment of Oedipus, whose curiosity and intelligence is unconstrained by dire warnings and brings about his downfall and that of his family. Augustine also attributes Adam's lack of resolve to curiosity.¹¹² In a clever riff on the Garden of Eden, Arthur C. Clarke describes city state paradise where the conditions for human happiness – including de facto immortality – have been provided for by the founders of the city. Human beings have been genetically programmed to accommodate to the city’s life style, but even futuristic science does not rid human beings of their curiosity and streak of rebelliousness. The consequences of one man’s violation of the strictest taboo leads to his self-willed departure from Eden and discovery that a “natural” life, that includes mortality, is a more satisfying.¹¹³

Most of the characteristics people attribute to our species portray it in a good light, which is typical of "us" and "other" distinctions. There is also a darker tradition that foregrounds negative qualities. Thucydides and Greek tragedy giver equal billing to this side of human nature and Christianity makes it dominant with its doctrine of original sin. Dispensationalism takes this pessimism a step further in its insistence that people are irredeemably corrupt and destined to roast in hell for eternity. Only a small number of true believers will be raptured, and a somewhat larger, but still minute. proportion of humanity, will make it to the millennium. And not all of them will gain admission to heaven. Dispensationalism's view of humanity offers a sharp contrast with that of early Christians – and many contemporary ones -- who are optimistic about the moral potential of their fellow beings.

These divergent takes on human nature confront different issues with respect to boundaries. Optimists for the most part take them seriously as they are anxious to distinguish humanity from other forms of life. Pessimists are much less concerned with borders as they emphasize fundamental similarities between humans and other animals. For optimists, as noted, boundary maintenance relies on intelligence or affect. This kind of differentiation will become increasingly difficult to maintain in a world we share with intelligent computers and androids, biologically enhanced humans and real or virtual symbiots. People may react by developing and deploying objectionable stereotypes about androids and other threatening forms of intelligence. Asimov's I Robot series is undoubtedly prescient in its presentation of anti-robot prejudice as a new form of racism.

In an experimental study, Goldenberg and co-researchers find that people exaggerate their differences from other animals. For social purposes, they argue, what counts is not what distinguishes humans from other species but what we believe does. We rely on equally subjective attributions to determine who among us count as fully human.¹¹⁴ Gaita finds something similar: people we stereotype are said to lack the kind of inner depth that we believe to characterize our group and make us human.¹¹⁵ Nick Haslam proposes two ways in which others can be dehumanized: we can make them more animal-like or deny them affect. The former portrays others as lacking culture, refinement, morality and nationality, while the latter, attributes coldness, rigidity and passivity to them – making them robot-like.¹¹⁶ In White Britain and Black Ireland, I examine how variants of these two strategies were widely used to justify colonialism.¹¹⁷

Human beings have been waging a rear-guard action in defense of their status for a long time. First came discoveries that the earth revolved around the sun and that neither was the center of the universe. Then Darwin developed his theory of evolution and evidence accumulated – still denied by some Christians – that humans and animals descend from common ancestors. The twentieth century brought secularization, which pulled the rug out from underneath the claim that god made man in his own image. It also saw the Freudian revolution and with it, evidence that we are not the rational beings we had supposed, but creatures driven as much by appetites over which we have uncertain control. More threatening still will be the advent of machine-made creatures who equal or surpass us in intelligence, looks, physical capabilities, reliability and honesty. Less likely but still possible, is an encounter with aliens from an advanced culture. Boundary maintenance in any of these worlds would be difficult. Ironically, it might become easier and attractive to super-capable androids or aliens keen to distance themselves for us. We would find their claim to superiority as offensive and degrading as colonized people and others who were victims of such discrimination.

There are sound psychological and philosophical reasons for rethinking our commitment to markers and boundaries. Such an approach to identity starts from the recognition that construction of self requires integration as well as separation. The central psychological dynamic of integration is empathy, defined as the ability to see ourselves through the eyes of others. From this outside perspective we come to appreciate our interlocutors as ontological equals and recognize that our understandings of justice are parochial. Reason and affect combine to make us more respectful of others and more amenable to their points of view and the need to compromise. This understanding goes back at least to Homer, who envisaged identity as a fragile construct that required empathetic relations with others – even military adversaries -- to sustain our identities. It found fuller conceptual development in classical Athens, where Plato developed dialogue as an alternative to rhetoric. Plato's Socrates, Thucydides' Pericles and Aristotle all insist that friendship, based on empathy, is the foundation of the polis.¹¹⁸

In modern times, Adam Smith makes a similar argument with his emphasis on sympathy. He reasons that "we have no immediate experience of what other men feel" so we need to exercise our imaginations to conceive of how "we ourselves should feel in the like situation." Sympathy is a cognitive process but also an emotional one because we must understand how someone feels as well what they might think. According to Smith, it is almost like entering another's body.¹¹⁹ What these and other formulations and have in common is the recognition that ability to experience the pain and pleasure of others, and our desire to have them experience ours, keeps us from being entirely selfish. Feelings are responsible for ethics because they provide the incentive to understand and evaluate our behavior as others see and experience it.¹²⁰ The reverse may also be true. Hannah Arendt argues that the absence of philia, and a resulting inability to see the world through the eyes of other people, is what made Adolf Eichmann into “one of the greatest criminals” of the twentieth century.¹²¹ Rousseau makes a somewhat similar point in Emile, where he reasons that a person who entered the world as an adult, without all the benefit of prior friendships and the feelings and reflection they encourage, would be a self-centered imbecile.¹²²

Orson Scott Card's novel Xenocide builds on this Platonic or Smithian insight. Ender Wiggin, the novel's hero has propagated this understanding through a best-selling biography of the last hive queen. This is in the aftermath of an all-out war of extermination between human beings and the insect-lie species – the "Buggers" – who have attacked earth. Unlike Plato, book and author are well-received, but not everyone is sympathetic. The overarching plot concerns the efforts of Ender, Jane – a life form that has arisen in a computer network -- and their allies to prevent earth’s fleet from destroying the one planet where empathy has allowed humans to develop meaningful friendships with other species. Xenocide can be read as a parable about the age-old struggle between those committed to security at all costs and those worried that this commitment will destroy the way of life security is supposed to preserve. As it is our values and ability to empathize that are understood to make us human, the Starways Congress would destroy our humanity to protect it. With his character Jane, Card implicitly follows Norbert Wiener's plea for "cyborg metaphysics," which involved the bridging of traditional boundaries between humans and machines" on the basis of what they share in common.¹²³

Separation and boundary maintenance should be considered a first and necessary step in a personal and species maturation. The sense of self it creates is a key requirement of mental health. People with multiple or entirely imaginary identities do not function well in society. Hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and Salvia divinorum can create states that mimic psychosis by creating out of body experiences and the feelings of multiples selves and realities. Jared Loughner, responsible for the 2011 Tucson massacre was a habitual user of Salvia divinorum.¹²⁴ The sense of self is also the foundation for subsequent integration with others without loss of identity. Such relationships are just as essential to our humanity as identity because they provide emotional gratification, widen our emotional and intellectual horizons and, by doing both, deepen our understanding of and contentment with ourselves. This process begins in childhood with the family but has the potential to become ever more inclusive, moving up the ladder of social aggregation through groups and nationalities to the species and even beyond. Herder thought along these lines, with his conception of all life as part of a "colossal organism" constituted by interactions among its separate parts.¹²⁵ His "colossal organism" might be considered an early version of the Gaia hypothesis. Peter Singer invokes evolutionary biology to infer an ethical imperative to extend our circle to animals and extend to some of them the same rights we have.¹²⁶

I understand empathy as a two way street; for us to empathize with others, they must be capable of empathizing with us. Empathy is different from sympathy, which we routinely feel toward animals and people – like those in comas -- who cannot return our feelings. Empathy, as the Greeks understood, is a product of friendship and this relationship is based on communication. Not all communication must be verbal, and we have many stories of friendships developing among people – even erstwhile adversaries -- who shared no common language. Hell in the Pacific, a 1968 movie starring Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin as shipwrecked Japanese naval captain and a downed American aviator, makes this point nicely. Deeper friendships require deeper communication, and for this language or telepathy is essential. The blind Helen Keller characterizes her mind and sense of self as undeveloped and her relationships with people largely superficial until she could communicate with others via symbols.¹²⁷ In Xenocide, Orson Scott Card distinguishes between species with whom humans can communicate and those with whom they cannot. The war between humanity and the Buggers was a tragedy because only afterwards did they discover that communication, and hence, accommodation, was possible. Communication seems a sensible rule of thumb and a good basis for determining how we respond to others and thus how far out we extend our circle of inclusion. I believe we have a moral responsibility to all animals, but would limit rights to species with whom we can communicate at the same level of cognitive complexity we can with fellow humans.

For Kant and Hegel, in-group solidarity is achieved through antagonism to outsiders. Empirically, this is not necessary, and the strategy entails serious costs – to ourselves as well as to others. There is much to be gained from pursing a "Schengen" approach to social relations by removing, or at least easing, the markers and boundaries we have erected to separate us from others. This will make it easier to extend our moral circle to include people Onora O'Neill describes as "distant strangers."¹²⁸ There is an undeniable trend in this direction in Western culture, more pronounced – and accordingly, more challenged -- in the twentieth century than in the past. It has received a big boost from anthropology, biology and sociology, which indicate that we have common origins and that all meaningful differences among use are social in nature. In international relations, the Eurocentric system has given way to an international one in which non-Western, non-Christian actors have gained legal as well as de facto equality. As Jens Bartelson observes, the political imaginary has increasingly raised the idea of a global community as a counter and offset to national ones.¹²⁹ Phil Cerny contends that structural changes in last century rendered the distinction between international relations and domestic politics all but meaningless. It is not that the sovereign state has withered away but rather that its borders are porous and increasingly meaningless as political, economic and social relations consist of overlapping and expanding webs of relationships and identities.¹³⁰ Future historians may describe the most fundamental conflict of the twentieth century as the struggle between those advocating greater inclusion against those pushing for greater exclusion. Both goals, and the frames of reference that enable and support them, can be understood as psychological and intellectual responses to modernity.

With respect to rights and obligations, there are two principal competing schools of thought in moral philosophy. There is a cosmopolitan approach to ethics that insists we treat all humans as moral equals. It requires an "impartialist response," that is which an impersonal standpoint that gives equal consideration to those with whom we have no personal or emotional connection.¹³¹ This tradition harks back to Plato and Diogenes Laertius and finds prominent contemporary voices in Jürgen Habermas, Onora O'Neill, Peter Singer and Martha Nussbaum.¹³²

The second approach, "communitarianism," rejects universalism as impractical. It insists that the abstract moral reasoning can only effectively be based on specific loyalties and attachments. People must be rooted in communities and invariably associate ethics with their traditions, beliefs and practices. The communitarian approach is associated with, among others, MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer.¹³³ Some feminist thinkers offer a variant in their emphasis on interpersonal relationships as the foundation of ethics.¹³⁴ This approach represents a sophisticated understanding of human psychology but also reflects disillusionment with grand projects, too often associated by with imperialism and other forms of exploitation and cultural insensitivity.¹³⁵

Anchoring ethics in local or national cultures does not preclude attempts to construct ethical systems with global implications as Molly Cochran, Fiona Robinson, Mervyn Frost and Michael Walzer nicely demonstrate.¹³⁶ There is, however, an unavoidable tension between the inclusiveness of a universalist, impartialist stance and the commitment to "us" over "others" inevitably associated with communitarian approaches. As Toni Erskine observes, these strategies involve a trade-off between feasibility and inclusiveness.¹³⁷ Pindar, whom she cites, astutely observes:

That which is close to home afflicts all alike,

but a heart soon goes free of grief

over a stranger's unhappiness.¹³⁸

Universalist strategies create a global "sphere of equal moral standing" but prove difficult to implement; people are less willing to sacrifice for those they do not know in contrast to those who qualify literally or figuratively as kith and kin. For this reason, communitarian strategies have greater intuitive appeal, but unfortunately narrow the circle of moral standing. They also facilitate stereotyping of outsiders.¹³⁹ Tolstoy goes further in his condemnation, insisting that preference for one's own people and the patriotism it spawns is "the root cause of war."¹⁴⁰

In Xenocide, Card rests his appeal for a universalism on the evident harm – extermination of at least two sentient species – that a communitarian perspective is likely to bring about. International relations scholars make similar arguments, contending that those who we can harm should have equal moral standing.¹⁴¹ In recent years, scholars have attempted to devise formulations that build on local loyalties but extend the circle of moral standing beyond them. They maintain that we may develop and retain loyalties to both the polis and the cosmopolis.¹⁴² In his constitutive theory of individuality, Mervyn Frost argues that a person is constituted as an ethical self by a state but the state is constituted by the system of states and citizens and states alike have responsibilities to others.¹⁴³ Toni Erskine elaborates the concept of "embedded cosmopolitanism," also based on the premise that community membership is morally constitutive. Such communities, she contends, transcend territorial borders, indeed make them fuzzy, indefinite, overlapping or dispersed. By doing so, provide the basis for bridging conventional boundaries and widening our ethical horizons.¹⁴⁴

My argument meshes nicely with these more syncretic approaches, especially the embedded cosmospolitanism of Erskine. Multiple identifications give rise to multiple identities. These identities, even if we are able to rank order them, sensitize us to the diversity of ethical perspectives and the communities in which they are rooted. Social, religious, professional, regional, athletic and other dentifications that cross national boundaries lead us to question the value and legitimacy of these boundaries and in turn make us more susceptible to arguments that members of these diverse communities should be incorporated in our moral sphere. This process is as much emotional as cognitive, as it rests on the personal ties with create with such people, which makes it easier, if not natural, to see them as our ontological equals. In effect, the tensions generated by multiple identities are both a source of angst but also of possible integration. They provide the cognitive and emotional foundations for extending our moral sphere and by doing so, of subsuming our diverse identifications into a more universal one.