No requiem for androids: a reply to Sennett and Wildman - response to articles by James Sennett and Wesley Wildman, Cross Currents, vol. 46, no. 2 summer 1996

Cross Currents, Fall, 1998 by Norman Lillegard

To the Editors:

In the Spring 1994 issue of this journal I argued that a complex android comparable to the fictional "Data" of Star Trek fame could not come within the ambit of many human moral and religious concerns. I was pleased that my discussion provoked the interest of various persons, and that Cross Currents saw fit to publish responses from Professor James Sennett and Professor Wesley Wildman in the Summer 1996 issue (vol. 46, no. 2). I am grateful to both of them for clarifications and stimulation - and to the editors for permitting me a final word.

I think Wildman does a fair job of representing my position, and I suspect that any disagreements we might have are minor as compared to the agreements which his essay suggests do exist. Therefore I will not comment further on his response. Sennett's response on the other hand misrepresents my argument and misses the central points. He points out that Data is not functionalist but connectionist, and he is probably right. But he then infers that my claim that Data does not fall within the parameters of the principal concept of a human person extractable from the Judaeo/Christian scriptures does not follow, since a connectionist machine essentially requires a body of some sort. My argument supposedly rested upon the claim that Data is "implicitly dualistic" - that is, does not essentially require a body, whereas in the biblical conception human personhood does require embodiment.

That, however, is not what I argued. The bulk of my article (roughly nine pages out of thirteen) was devoted to exploring the idea that various morally significant predicates, such as "in pain" are "parochial" in the following sense: their core attributions are made to bodies of a certain kind - in particular, bodies which are born, reproduce in a certain way, are subject to change, suffering, and death. That is just the sort of body which is essential to human personhood on the biblical view.(1) Now it is clear that Data does not have that kind of body. For example, when asked, "How are you today?" he responds, "I do not change with the passage of time."

I think strong arguments can be given for the claim that various moral judgements (not all of them to be sure) can only come into play in connection with biological entities which are minimally as just described. Thus if there are any angels or cherubim (who for all I know could be "persons") they do not come under those judgements. We are not, for logical reasons, under any obligation to refrain from killing or having illicit sex with the likes of Gabriel. So far as I can tell Sennett's view entails that I could have the same sort of moral concern over, say, holding someone's arm in a flame, whether it were an arm like mine or one made of steel. I do not deny the conceptual possibility that something made of steel or some similar material might be "conscious" in various ways. "Consciousness" is, so far as I can make it out, a catch-all term for a great variety of capacities and occurrences. I do deny that such a being could feel the pain of burning, and I cannot imagine what it would mean to claim otherwise. Such facts have an obvious bearing on certain forms of moral and also, as I argued, religious, concern.

Many of the anthropological concepts which operate crucially in scripture are, it seems to me, parochial in the sense I have tried to explain. For example, the fact that I am the sort of thing that must eventually die is crucial. 'Die' here denotes a highly specific cessation of an existence subject to various contingencies, including birth itself. Being born is crucially different from being "constructed," and I will expand on that point below in some remarks on cloning. Both ethics and religion sometimes draw upon such abstractions as "rights" and "justice," and I do not deny that much of importance in the relations between human persons, and also, between human persons and nonhuman persons (God? Corporations?) can be captured by such abstractions. But much that is of great importance to biblical thought about our religious destinies and about how we should treat others requires reference to the sorts of parochial facts I have mentioned, and cannot be captured by such abstractions.

Now as I understand these facts about biblical anthropology they imply something from which Sennett demurs. I find his demurral revealing. It rests upon the claim that the resurrection of the body is an essential biblical teaching. Supposing this is true, does it not enforce, rather than detract from, my central claim? It cannot be you if it is not strongly connected to the body that was you when you died. The doctrine of the resurrection of the body admittedly raises all sorts of conceptual, hermeneutical, and dogmatic puzzles. The early fathers of the church were quite aware of many of these difficulties, and contemporary philosophers continue to puzzle about the identity requirements imposed by that doctrine, not to mention about identity itself, which is one of the most difficult topics in contemporary metaphysics and logic.