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Ethics Biology: Are There Ethical Genomes?
Published in Howard Winet, Ethics for Bioengineering Scientists, 2021
Mozu was able to elicit acceptance by her fellow monkeys by providing them with grooming of obviously poor quality. The fact that poor grooming quality did not prevent acceptance by the hosts creates an enticing basis for interpreting host behavior in human terms. However, we interpret it, there is an acceptance process taking place that needs explaining. Each interaction in this example is a step in the formation of some kind of bond. Mozu’s behavior, over time, exceeds some reward threshold for the dominant females and as a result of their feedback to Mozu, a form of cooperation develops between the participants. It includes no apparent expectation on the part of the recipient for immediate repayment, or in the case of Mozu, mercy. In other words, one individual gives benefits to another—on a given occasion—without immediate reciprocal payback from the benefactor. This behavior is called “reciprocal altruism” and has the following characteristics:The exchanged acts, while beneficial to the recipient, are costly to the performer.There is a time lag between giving and receiving.Giving is contingent on receiving, even if the gift is not of high quality (de Waal 1997).
What Demarks the Metamorphosis of Human Individuals to Posthuman Entities?
Published in The New Bioethics, 2019
Are brutes capable of recognising certain goods and acting with virtue? Though there are recorded incidences of altruism in the more cognitively developed primates (Herrmann et al. 2007, Jensen et al. 2007; Warneken and Tomasello 2009 somehow refuting their earlier work: Warneken et al. 2007), they concern only reciprocal altruism,13 and not a true sacrifice of benevolence, nor do these primates have a sense of justice – these being human specific social virtues. Further, it remains uncertain if brutes possess any concept of basic goods like beauty and religion (Cicero 2014, loc 45551), and any application of those to each other and society, with religion in itself being a social relation between believer/s and deity/ies (Finnis 2011, pp. 87–90). Human goods are hence pursued in society, they are always relational, and go beyond the basic needs of the body.14 Thomism pictures humans as intelligent creatures, who primarily manifest their wisdom and achieve their goods in the context of relationships.
On building a person: benchmarks for robotic personhood
Published in Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 2020
The human species is a cooperative species, much more cooperative than any other species where cooperation extends beyond immediate relatives. Unlike ants, bees and even wolves that are bound together primarily by genetic relations, human beings are bound to and cooperate almost equally with both relatives and non-relatives. During most of our existence as a species we have existed in small groups that included non-relatives to whom individuals were bound through marriage or some other form of pair and group binding. Unlike our closest living primate relative, chimpanzees, where males share females in their group, human males and females form strong individual reproductive bonds, and males usually know which children are their own, so can, when necessary, provide greater investment in them than in other individuals in their group. While this binding with spouses and offspring is understandable based on genetic relatedness and kin selection, binding with other individuals is not. There must be some other individual selective advantage that makes our high level of cooperation beyond kin possible. Two major evolutionary selective mechanisms have been proposed: group selection (e.g., Wilson & Sober, 1994) and reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971). Of the two, reciprocal altruism is the most important, because group selection already presupposes some means by which individuals originally entered into cooperative arrangements from which they could eventually increase their individual and collective fitness by competition between groups. This cooperative binding within the group, though due in part to genetic relatedness, through reciprocal altruism was supplemented by pair and clique bonding between unrelated individuals who had common goals and who distributed the additional rewards and fewer costs of cooperation on a roughly equal, though sometimes only a minimally advantageous, basis among themselves, thus outcompeting individuals in less cooperative groups. When reciprocal altruism is at work, close attention must be paid to fitness costs and benefits that occur between bound pairs of unrelated individuals, otherwise these bonds break down. This is the foundation of ‘friendship’ and long-term reciprocally rewarding relationships. Such long-term reciprocally rewarding relationships probably occurred early in hominin evolution, and eventually incorporated the whole local group of males and females that cooperated in group defense, hunting & gathering, care of young, and who arranged marriages between independent genetic lines (Barresi, 2017b; Tomasello, 2014). These mutually supporting in-group bonds laid the foundation also for intergroup cooperation as well as competition. I believe that all these long-term and varied cooperative arrangements were the evolutionary basis for human personhood (Barresi, 2017b).