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Science Fiction and Human Nature
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13274 |
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EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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10 / 1987 |
1,392 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
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I find an interesting connection between the substance of Michael Levin's article on human nature and ethics, which will appear next month, and science fiction, the main theme of Currents in Modern Thought in this issue. My books in the field of ethics are solidly based in the naturalistic tradition. I consider it an absurdity to believe that ethics can be constructed on a totally abstract basis, whether or not contractarian, and have demonstrated how all such attempts fail. I have also shown some of the ways in which ethical systems may differ depending upon the nature of man.
The Judeo-Christian religious tradition is also based on a similar assumption. The claim that man is made in the image of God obviously is not meant to be taken literally. The prohibition of graven images and the constraint against using the name of God are intended, at least in part, to guard against such a heresy. God is a mystery that we cannot know except insofar as our Maker speaks to us through our heads and hearts.
God is that he is and we are that we are. But what we are is what he made. And it is in this sense that we are made in his image. We are, thus, naturally under God's law and are most free when we obey it not as an external and imposed constraint but as part of our nature. In this sense, the Judeo-Christian tradition and philosophical naturalism are allies. If this type of naturalism is what secular humanism proclaims, then it and the Judeo-Christian religions are allies, for the same mystery is presented in a different package.
The contrasting position is that conceptions of the good are subjective or arbitrary and that the world is a dice game in which what we are is not more probable than any other outcome. This interpretation is, at bottom, one of despair that pits humans against their own nature, for our existential development is greatly influenced by our beliefs about ourselves and the nature of the world. The Mafia leader, for instance, will have convinced himself that he would be a fool to behave otherwise given the character of the world in which he lives.
One argument against the naturalistic thesis is offered by anthropologists who point to the vast variety of human behavior and values. It is not sufficient to point out that all societies have rules against murder, for instance. What constitutes murder may differ radically from society to society. The commonality of categories shows only that all societies are organized and, hence, seek to control or limit various types of activity.
Some religious people have asked how a just God could have permitted the holocaust. As in the case of the secular anthropologist, the vast diversity of human practice is used in an attempt to discredit a naturalistic ethics.
One science fiction novel - The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad - has a holocaust as its theme. The book has a preface in which Adolf Hitler fled Germany in 1923 after the beer hall putsch for Greenwich Village in New York and became a science fiction writer. The enclosed novel, The Lords of the Swastika, is his posthumous Hugo Award-winning novel.
The novel begins in a world devastated by nuclear war. In addition to mankind, there is also a mutant race of snakelike creatures with great hypnotic powers who are corrupting
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