Human Dignity and Bioethics

90 | Robert P. Kraynak
still believe that human consciousness arises from an immaterial substance
like a rational soul or in an irreducible free will which gives
human beings the power to choose independently of material causation.
Nonsense, says Dennett, we are complex machines, and the
mind is just the motion of brain cells and neurological processes that
will one day be replicated by the fancy robots of Artificial Intelligence.
We may still speak of human “souls,” Dennett argues mischievously,
as long as we understand them to be made up of tiny robots.
And we may still speak of “free will” as long as we mean the way our
genetically programmed selves react to the environment rather than
the rational choice of ultimate ends.
None of this would be very surprising if Dennett followed his
Darwinian materialism to its logical conclusions in ethics and politics.
After all, scientific materialists have been around for a long time,
attacking religion, miracles, immaterial causes, and essential natures.
Think of Lucretius and his poem about the natural world consisting
of atoms in the void, or Hobbes’s mechanistic universe of “bodies
in motion,” or B. F. Skinner’s “behaviorism,” Ayn Rand’s “objectivism,”
E. O. Wilson’s “sociobiology,” Darwin’s Darwinism, and even
Nietzsche’s “will to power.” But all of these materialist debunkers of
higher purposes and soul-doctrines drew conclusions about morality
that were harsh and pessimistic, if not cynical and amoral. Lucretius
saw that a universe made up of atoms in the void was indifferent to
man, and he counseled withdrawal from the world for the sake of
philosophical “peace of mind”—letting the suffering and injustices of
the world go by, like a detached bystander on the seashore watching
a sinking ship, and treating the spectacle of people dying with equanimity
as impersonal bundles of atoms in the void. Hobbes, Skinner,
Rand, and Nietzsche saw humans as essentially selfish creatures of
pleasure, power, and domination who in some cases can be induced
by fear and greed to lay off killing each other. Darwin never spelled
out the moral implications of his doctrine, but presumably he could
not have objected to the strong dominating the weak or to nature’s
plagues and disasters as ways of strengthening the species. Herbert
Spencer’s Social Darwinism—the survival of the fittest in a competitive
world—is a logical conclusion of Darwinian natural science.
But such conclusions are alien to Daniel Dennett. He is a Darwinian
materialist in his cosmology and metaphysics while also strongly