Sociologies (May 2020)
Un bouleversement radical de nos repères anthropologiques et des conditions de la moralité : le déclin ou la fin de l’exception humaine ?
Abstract
If there is a specificity of modern morality, it is that it is built on the human exception, on a set of presuppositions that ensured its justification: responsibility, autonomy, capacity, will, free will... and on a certain number of figures of the engaged individual who illustrated it: entrepreneur, citizen, activist... Analyzing the internal evolution of this anthropology of the moderns underlying their way of considering morality, the article first shows how the human being, placed at the top of the chain of beings because of his intellectual and moral capacities, sees his exceptionality progressively transformed into responsibility for the disasters of the anthropocene. It then shows how this internal evolution of our anthropological coordinates actually opened the doors to the gradual exit from this exception and the emergence of what the article calls a zoo-techno-anthropology continuum. On the one hand, anti-speciesism, the rise of vegetarianism, of veganism, of sensitivity to animal suffering, of the propensity to lend non-human animals capacities that were hitherto reserved for human animals... On the other hand, the trivialization of post- or trans-humanism, of artificial intelligence,... which leads us, for example, to wonder about the responsibility of robots. A radical transformation of the coordinates from which to think about morality.
