ABSTRACT
Essentialism is usually treated in derogatory terms in social science; anti-essentialists frequently assert that humankind is socially constructed and constructing. However, critical realists cannot be constructionists given the importance in their ontology of the ‘real’, which is maintained in relation to the natural, practical and social orders. Whether we can access it or not, we are never justified in substituting our own epistemology for reality itself. This is nowhere more relevant than in this concluding volume of our series on ‘The Future of the Human’. What is it that has a future? Why is it that so many theorists (various) see its future as threatened by the development of AI robots? Why is the most common attitude a defensive one on behalf of future humans towards being subordinated by such robots (often characterized as ‘robophobia’) in this text itself? Is there an alternative, albeit unpopular, that could legitimately be termed ‘robophilia’? Given that no-one could defend the unchanging historical character of the human being (for example, in physique, longevity, skills and knowledge), then essentialism assumes a huge importance in order that such ongoing changes do not fundamentally transform the human into a different kind, through enhancement techniques, for example. In other words, some distinction between the essential and the accidental properties and powers of humankind needs to be upheld in this respect. This introduction reviews briefly five contending versions of the essence of being human; based respectively on Creationism, biological species, sortals, capacities and dignity, a list that does not claim to be exhaustive. None of the contributors are exclusive supporters of one of the above versions in their chapters. Nevertheless, there are frequent echoes from all of them, the most frequent being the tenacity of ‘species’ even if under recent redefinitions of it. This raises the interesting but unanswered question, namely can a human being have multiple essences?
