| Posthuman EthicsPosthuman Ethics
Dale Carrico has some interesting ideas about what posthumanism should not mean, drawn from a rather bleak picture of what humanism was all about:
Clothed in the language of universality, the entitlements of the humanity proclaimed by humanists have never extended to more than a fraction of actual human beings. Assured of its location on a “natural†progressive trajectory attaining inevitably toward universal emancipation, humanism too readily accommodated contemporary injustices as temporary and, hence, somehow tolerable -- especially to those humanists who didn’t happen to suffer them. And, further, as the ethics of a questionably contrued "human race" and of the universal "civilization" problematically connected to this race, it grows ever more difficult to shake the troubling analogies between humanism and its debased technoscientific companion discourse: the "race science" that legitimized every brutal imperial, colonial, globalizing, ghettoizing, apartheid regime in modern memory.
Needless to say, these painful recognitions demand painful reckonings. It is this crisis of humanist conscience -- which is not really one crisis, so much as many different crises, arising out of a variety of concrete situations and taking a proliferating variety of consequential forms -- that more properly goes by the name "post-humanism." |
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