Some guy in a podcast keeps asking
Like week after week after week
What does it mean to be human
It doesn’t mean anything to be human
James Joyce one of those pithy Irish satirists
Went on and on about how the Odyssey
Was so much more human
Than the Iliad or The Divine Comedy
But human means nothing more
Than the genome of homo sapiens
We don’t say or maybe we do
Chasing a feather that’s so feline
Begging for a treat that’s so canine
Clomping up to the rooftop that’s so caprine
And what do we mean by that’s so human
Probably something like vulnerable or fallible
Maybe something like persistent in confronting adversity
Well every organism every object is vulnerable
And you don’t even need a brain to persevere
Witness the phytoplankton’s frenzy
To swim toward lifegiving light
It does however seem rare in nature
To be able to fail to fall to commit an error
Now sometimes we see in pal pooch’s eyes
The pang of regret of sorrow of guilt
No doubt an effect of our species’ long affiliation
And what does Puppy mean to express
With this lugubrious facial expression
That she has broken some commandment no
Merely that she desirous of pleasing has fallibly failed
To comply with the Commander’s wishes
Perhaps we humans too fail
When we fail to obey
But everybody knows that we labor under no compulsion
To carry out a wrongful order
And that to do so is itself a wrongful act
So it would seem that wrong precedes command
And in any case we distinguish between
Obeying the Commander and obeying the command
And we humans in our inventiveness
Can devise a thousand atrocities
Not proscribed in the tables of the law
And how can we fall if we can’t do the right thing
What is this doing the right thing
Maybe doing the right thing
Is doing what you think is the right thing
But if so Hitler Dahmer and loyal-feeling henchmen
Are right
And that can’t be right
It can’t be true that fulfilling your own little motive
Is right even at the cost of the innocent multitude
Regardless of the prestige of him who prefers
The destruction of the entire universe over his own hurt finger
When we happen to do right
Assuming that such a thing is possible
We doubtless do what we think is right
But we can think wrongly
About what is right or anything else
So how then might we think rightly about what is right
Since merely thinking something doesn’t make it right
Any more than merely commanding something does
How can we make a good judgment
And more specifically a moral judgment
Flipping a coin is not a judgment
Nor is preferring chocolate over vanilla
A judgment worthy of the name
Is a response to a reason
That is to a kind of fact
That is to one or maybe more than one of those facts
That urge us in a particular direction
That urge us to take an action
Or to assume an attitude
Or to hold a belief
To make a moral judgment means
To represent a moral fact
For there are moral facts
Which are just as real
As the facts of science of math
Of history of what you had for breakfast
And thus moral facts remain uninfluenced
By our preferences our attitudes
Indeed our attitudes and preferences
Should derive from facts and not the other way around
And thus humans can act as moral agents
That is why not just say as persons
And thus we humans enjoy or suffer from
A dual character animal and agent
And all the persons we know are human alas
But it’s a spectrum innit
As the repentant dog’s hangdog look implies
And who knows the neurology of a whale
Or of a phytoplankton lacking a nervous system
Or what other moral agents populate the universe or universes
So we certainly shouldn’t be ashamed
Of our humanness our animality
Our hair sweat blemishes smell
Exudations of blood and phlegm
Body horror is madness
You ask me why I have lost my wits
Oh Celia Celia Celia shits
But if our bodies give rise to some noxiousness
They are much more the site of pleasure
Sensory pleasure the epitome
Though not the sole variety
Of pleasure generally
And pleasure is good
And we can know and participate
In the pleasures and pains of others
Their covetousness and noble aspirations
Their exaltation and ennui
Our fallibility our capacity for failure
Makes sense only in the light
Of a capacity to do the right thing
Those who try to ascribe
More or less humanity to things
Are responding dimly perhaps
To our responsiveness to reasons
Nobody knows or understands everything
Or much of anything
And to err is human
To forgive only reasonable