Webb Keane (Allen Lane)
No society we know of ever lived without morals. Roughly the same ethical ideas arise, again and again, over time and in different societies. Where do these notions of right and wrong come from? Might there be an ideal way to live?
In Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the moral imagination, anthropologist Webb Keane at the University of Michigan argues that morality doesn鈥檛 arise from universal principles but from the human imagination. For him, moral ideas are sparked in the friction between objectivity, when we think about the world as if it were a story, and subjectivity, in which we are in some sort of conversation with the world.
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The classic trolley problem elucidates Keane鈥檚 point. If you saw an out-of-control tram car hurtling towards five people and could pull a lever that sent it down a different track, killing only one innocent bystander, you would probably flip the switch.
If, on the other hand, you could save five people by pushing an innocent bystander into the path of the trolley (using them, in Keane鈥檚 phrase, 鈥渁s an ad hoc trolley brake鈥�), you would probably choose not to interfere. The difference in your reaction depends on whether you are looking at the situation objectively, at some mechanical remove, or subjectively imagining yourself in the thick of the action.
What moral attitude we adopt to situations depends on how socially charged we think they are. I would happily kick a stone down the road; I would never kick a dog. Where, though, are the boundaries of this social world? If you can have a social relationship with your pet dog, can you have one with your cancer tumour? Your god?
Keane says that it is only by asking such questions that we acquire morals in the first place. And we are constantly trying to tell the difference between the social and the non-social, testing connections and experimenting with boundaries, because the question of what makes a human lies at the heart of all morality.
Readers of Animals, Robots, Gods will encounter a wide range of non-humans, from sacrificial horses to chatbots, with whom they might conceivably establish a social relationship. Frankly, it is too much content for so short a book. Readers interested in the ethics of artificial intelligence, for instance, won鈥檛 find much new insight here. On the other hand, I found Keane鈥檚 distillation of fieldwork into the ethics of hunting and animal sacrifice both gripping and provoking.
We also meet humans maintained by technology. Keane reports on a study by anthropologist Cheryl Mattingly in which devout Christians Andrew and Darlene won鈥檛 turn off the machines keeping their daughter, who has been diagnosed as brain-dead, alive.
The doctors believe that, in the effort to save her, their science has cyborgised the girl to the point at which she is no longer a person. The parents believe that, medically maintained or not, conscious or not, their child being alive is significant and sufficient to make her a person.
This is hardly some simplistic battle between religion and science. Rather, it is an argument about where we set the boundaries within which we apply moral imperatives like the one telling us not to kill.
Morals don鈥檛 just guide lived experience 鈥� they arise from personal experience. There can be no trolley problems without trolleys. This, Keane argues, is why morality and ethics are best approached anthropologically. 鈥淲e cannot make sense of ethics, or expect them of others, without understanding what makes them inhabitable, possible ways to live,鈥� he writes. 鈥淎nd we should neither expect, nor, I think, hope that the diversity of ways of life will somehow converge onto one 鈥榖est鈥� way of living.鈥�
We communicate best with strangers when we accept them as moral beings. A Western animal rights activist would never hunt an animal. A Chewong hunter from Malaysia wouldn鈥檛 dream of laughing at one. If these strangers really want to get the measure of each other, they should each ask the same, devastatingly simple question: just which bits of the world feel human to you?
Simon Ings is a writer based in London
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