What is Essential to Being Human? (The Future of the Human)

This book asks whether there exists an essence exclusive to human beings despite their continuous enhancement – a nature that can serve to distinguish humans from artificially intelligent robots, now and in the foreseeable future. Considering what might qualify as such an essence, this volume demonstrates that the abstract question of ‘essentialism’ underpins a range of social issues that are too often considered in isolation and usually justify ‘robophobia’, rather than ‘robophilia’, in terms of morality, social relations and legal rights. Any defence of human exceptionalism requires clarity about what property(ies) ground it and an explanation of why these cannot be envisaged as being acquired (eventually) by AI robots. As such, an examination of the conceptual clarity of human essentialism and the role it plays in our thinking about dignity, citizenship, civil rights and moral worth is undertaken in this volume. What is Essential to Being Human? will appeal to scholars of social theory and philosophy with interests in human nature, ethics and artificial intelligence.

Margaret S. Archer founded the Centre for Social Ontology in 2013 (now based at the École de Management, Université de Grenoble) when she was Professor of Social Theory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. Her books include Social Origins of Educational Systems; Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory; Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach; Being Human: The Problem of Agency; Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation; Making our Way Through the World; The Reflexive Imperative; Late Modernity: Trajectories Towards Morphogenic Society; Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order; Morphogenesis and the Crisis of Normativity; and Morphogenesis and Human Flourishing.

Andrea M. Maccarini is Professor of Sociology and Associate Chair in the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies at the University of Padua, Italy. He is also a member of the teaching board of the Ph.D. programme in Sociology and Social Research at the University of Bologna, Italy, and has been a visiting scholar at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Boston University and the Humboldt-Universität Berlin, among others. He is a board member of IACR (International Association for Critical Realism) and collaborator of the Centre for Social Ontology, founded by Margaret S. Archer. His current research interests lie in the fields of social theory, education and socialiaation, and cultural change. He is the author of Deep Change and Emergent Structures in Global Society: Explorations in Social Morphogenesis and the co-editor of Engaging with the World: Agency, Institutions, Historical Formations.