Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination

How do we live ethical lives alongside others? A fascinating exploration of our moral universe We have always lived with ethically significant others, whether they are the pets we keep, the gods we believe in or the machines we are endowing with life. How should we treat them as our world changes? In Animals, Robots, Gods, acclaimed anthropologist Webb Keane provides a new vision of ethics, defined less by our minds, religion or society, and more by our interactions with those around us. Drawing on ground-breaking research by fieldworkers around the world, he explores the underpinnings of our moral universe. Along the way we investigate the ethical dilemmas of South Asian animal rights activists, Balinese cockfighters, Japanese robot fanciers - even macho cowboys. We meet a hunter in the Yukon who explains his prey generously gives itself up to him; a cancer sufferer in Thailand who sees his tumour as a reincarnated ox; a computer that gets you to confess your anxieties as if you were on the psychiatrist's couch. With charm, wit and insight, Keane offers us a better understanding of our doubts and certainties, showing how centuries of conversations between us and non-humans inform our conceptions of morality, and will continue to guide us in the age of AI and beyond.

About the Author :
Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and the author of multiple pioneering works on the philosophy of social thought. His research has been featured in Los Angeles Times, Esquire, USA Today, Financial Times, and on CBS TV News, among others.

Review :
This book is penetrating, illuminating, wise, learned, and surprising. The chapters on robots and Artificial Intelligence are simply the best yet written on the subject. The excitement and anxieties about this new technology revisit perennial questions about the nature of being human and our duties to god-like beings - it is fitting that an anthropologist should be the one to show this. An extraordinary achievement The book I didn't know I'd been waiting for - a fascinating trip through time and space, likening the uncanniness of A.I. not to science fiction but to religious mysteries and the near-humanness of animals. This erudite and original meditation on our relationship with non-human creatures will change the way you think about ethics Human beings, themselves a work in progress, have had millions of years to come to terms with animals and have now turned their attention to machines. Our success at domesticating wild organisms may have lulled us into expecting obedient behavior from things we build. Webb Keane, who argues that hunters of undomesticated animals offer a better model, brings us an update from the field Webb Keane has a marvellous ability to extend the scope of our moral compass not only to all varieties of human thought but also to the non-human beings with whom we share the biosphere. He is one of the world’s foremost and most thoughtful anthropologists. This book is a must-read, written with wit and clarity In this charming and lucid book, Webb Keane invites readers to question where humans begin and end - and to what and whom we bear responsibilities. His understanding of ethics delightfully spins with relationships, interactions, situations, and play The boundaries of our moral worlds are in flux as we rethink the claims made on us by animals, robots, humans on life-support, and AI. Webb Keane, the most important contemporary anthropologist of language and interaction, brilliantly guides us through the resulting murk. Drawing on research from around the world, and showing how people’s engagements with supernatural figures long ago raised questions of moral standing that we now apply to these other beings, this gracefully written book will make you think productively about your own life in ways you likely never imagined