The responses that took the Robopet exercise most seriously inevitably concerned themselves with how to evaluate robopets as beings that might be worthy of respect, compassion and social benefit. It is worthwhile reading all the responses in this light in order to compare approaches to this common concern, and the justifications of the various conclusions reached (the List is archived at: http://listserv.brown.edu/chv-l.html). A question that seems to arise from this comparison is whether a "species-neutral" criterion for ethical or practical judgement is possible and, if not, on what basis should we prefer one criterion (e.g. the capacity for emotion) to another (e.g. the Turing Test)?
This is perhaps more relevant to our reading of Arendt's book than you might think, since one of the great themes of the book is to consider what humans have valued in ancient and modern times and to argue for what should be of value today.
Arendt's The Human Condition, Chapter 1
Last time we talked a bit about what Arendt might have had in mind by "the power of speech," and indeed it seems that her criticism of scientists as moving "in a realm where speech has lost its power" seems compelling. In my other class, however, we just finished H.G. Wells' The World Set Free (1914), which contains what might be considered a critique of a kind of politics in which speech retains too much of its power.
The novel, written at the start of World War I, imagined a future in which life throughout the world was transformed by the discovery of atomic energy. In Chapter 2, "The Last War," Wells writes:
"A recent historical writer has described the world of that time as one that 'believed in established words and was invincibly blind to the obvious in things.' Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands. Yet the broad facts must have glared upon any intelligent mind. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side. Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as the Americans used to phrase it, 'fooled around' with the paraphernalia and pretensions of war."It is only by realising this profound, this fantastic divorce between the scientific and intellectual movement on the one hand, and the world of the lawyer-politician on the other, that the men of a later time can hope to understand this preposterous state of affairs. Social organisation was still in the barbaric stage. There were already great numbers of actively intelligent men and much private and commercial civilisation, but the community, as a whole, was aimless, untrained and unorganised to the pitch of imbecility. Collective civilisation, the 'Modern State,' was still in the womb of the future...." (The World Set Free, chapter 2, section 5)
To whom are you more sympathetic here: Wells or Arendt?
Let's continue with some questions we didn't get to last time:
Arendt's The Human Condition, Chapter 2
Questions:
Jeff Lugowe on Chapter 2, sections 7-10
For Next Time:: Finish chapter 6 The Human Condition.