Sublime

People are not monads. A real, live human self is always already partial to certain, select others. Morality needs to take this essential fact about human selfhood into account rather than pretend to override it.

By promoting self-organization, energy flux gradually converts a clump of mindless molecules into information-processing machinery with agency—meaning the self-drive and purposeful action that we associate with life.

But for our commonsense notions of human agency and morality to hold, it seems that our actions cannot be merely lawful products of our biology, our conditioning, or anything else that might lead others to predict them.

Note Hull’s comment that if a person or group dissociates the species-specific designation “Homo sapiens” from the designation “human being,” with all of its attendant moral and theological implications, then that person or group has a “less plausible position.” Why? Why should that which we see, hear, feel, taste, or touch (or observe through

realism, or a “realist empiricism.”117