Science (Fiction) and Posthuman Ethics: Redefining the Human

Abstract

The boundaries of the ethical have traditionally coincided with the boundaries of humanity. This, however, is no longer the case. Scientific developments, such as genetic engineering, stem-cell research, cloning, the Human Genome Project, new paleontological evidence, and the rise of neuropsychology call into question the very notion of human being and thus require a new conceptual map for ethical judgment. The contours of this map may be seen to emerge in works of science fiction (SF), which not only vividly dramatize the implications and consequences of new technologies and discoveries, but also exert a powerful influence on culture, creating a feedback loop of images and ideas. This essay focuses on three SF topoi: the human/animal evolutionary boundary; non-biological subjectivity (AI); and the human/alien interaction. It explores each of these topoi in a selection of SF texts, including novels by H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Stephen Baxter, William Gibson, Stanislaw Lem and others, showing how the boundaries of humanity are expanded and then exploded through the radical subversion of the tenets of liberal humanism.

Notes

1. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, So You Think You Are Human?: A Brief History of Humankind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1.

2. Sheryl Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 7.

3. Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow, 19.

4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1966) Trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith. (New York: Random House, 1974), xxiii.

5. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957), trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin Books, 1973), 101.

6. Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy: The Psychology of Enmity (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 16.

7. And, conversely, for a dedicated vegan or a loving pet-owner, animals, despite their biological dissimilarity, become “humanized.”

8. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under Nazis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

9. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149.

10. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1988), trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 2.

11. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

12. Thomas Foster, The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xxvii.

13. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 149.

14. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 65.

15. Carl D. Malmgren, Worlds Apart: Narratology of Science Fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 11.

16. Aristotle, Ethics, bk. 1, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8ethc10.txt.

17. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: Random House, 1975), 8.

18. http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/interviews-debates/200106—.htm; accessed 12/7/10.

19. Ibid.

20. T. H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (1895) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

21. H. G. Wells, The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells with an Introduction by the Author (London: V. Gollancz, 1933), 242–43.

22. Olaf Stapledon, Sirius (1944) (London: Victor Gollanz, 2000).

23. Stephen Baxter, Evolution (New York: Ballantine, 2002), 131.

24. Baxter, Evolution, 472.

25. Baxter, Evolution, 504.

26. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 8.

27. Michael Sherman, The Science of Good and Evil (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004), 19.

28. Michael Ruse, “Is Darwinian Metaethics Possible (And If It Is, Is It Well Taken?),” in Evolutionary Ethics and Cotemporary Biology, ed. Giovanni Bonioli and Gabriele De Anna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 25.

29. Giovanni Bonioli, “The Descent of Instinct and the Ascent of Ethics,” in Bonioli and De Anna, Evolutionary Ethics and Cotemporary Biology, 37.

30. Baxter, Evolution, 577, 576.

31. Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in A Postmodern Reader, ed. Joseph P. Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 342–76.

32. Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad (1972), trans. Michael Kandel (New York: The Seabury Press, 1974), 166.

33. Lem, The Cyberiad, 168–69.

34. Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (New York: Del Rey Books, 1968).

35. Harlan Ellison, The Essential Ellison (Beverly Hills, CA: Morpheus International, 1991).

36. William Gibson, Neuromancer ((New York: Ace Books, 1984).

37. Foster, The Souls of Cyberfolk, 10.

38. Greg Egan, “Chaff,” in Our Lady of Chernobyl (Paramatta, Australia: MirrorDanse Books, 1995), 32.

39. Damien Broderick, Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1995), 49.

40. Broderick, Reading by Starlight, 51.

41. Stanislaw Lem, “The Solaris Station,” http://english.lem.pl/arround-lem/adaptations/soderbergh/147-the-solaris-station; accessed 3/9/10.

42. Stanislaw Lem, Eden (1959), trans. Marc E. Heine (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989); Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961), trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (New York: Walter & Co., 1970).

43. Silvia Benso, The Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 43.

44. Yi Dongshin, “Toward A Posthuman Ethics,” Re/construction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (January 2006). http://reconstruction.eserver.org/043/yi.htm; accessed 4/9/2010.