本文是一篇英语论文，伊恩·麦克尤恩以其敏锐的眼光关注人性问题，以人造人在人类社会生存的伦理困境为镜，反映人类自身的贪婪、欲望、欺骗和谎言等。而人类与人造人的和解的伦理选择则反映了麦克尤恩对和谐的人机伦理关系持乐观态度。而我们只有深刻反思“何以为人”，才会让未来人机和谐共处成为可能。
Chapter OneIntroduction
1.1 Ian McEwan and Machines Like Me
McEwan was born in 1948,and his father was in the Army,which allowed thefamily to travel all over the world,including Germany,North Africa and Singapore,until he was sent back to England at the age of 11 to study at a boarding school.McEwan was very fond of reading at his early age which was influenced by hismother.When they were in North Africa,her mother worked in the bookstore ofYoung Men’s Christian Association for a while and would often bring him books toread,which established a sound foundation for his career in writing.However,theperiod of boarding school for him was bleak.In his school,bullying was rife,most ofthe students were obsessed with sex.Although he was not bullied,he was nevercoached.This experience had a great influence on McEwan’s later works.When hewas writing,the thoughts often oscillated between rationality and anti-rationality.
In 1966,McEwan went to the University of Sussex to study English and French.In 1970,he graduated with top student in English Literature from the University ofSussex and entered the University of East Anglia where he studied modern fiction andcreative writing course under professor Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson.In1971,he graduated with an MA in Creative Writing.In 1972,McEwan published hisfirst short story Homemade in the New American Review,he got a big reward to havea trip to Afghanistan.Later,he made a figure in the literature arena with two shortstory collections,First Love,Last Rites and In Between the Sheets.These twocollections depicted the inherent evil and complexity of human beings which madereaders astonished.
1.2 Literature review
1.2.1 Studies at home
Machines like me is a new work of Ian McEwan which published in 2019,thetheme of novel is about complicated relationship between artificial humans andhuman beings.For a long time,McEwan desire to create a novel about robot,andthere was a role about it in conception of Astonishment.Taking“machines like me”askey word to search it at CNKI,there are 14 items in total from 2019 to 2023,five ofthem are journal articles,two of them are newspapers and the rest of them aredissertations.Domestic scholars mainly use the method of ethical literary criticism toexplore the ethical phenomena in novels and reveal the ethical implications behindthem.
In this novel,the appearance of these machines is almost the same as our people,and they are set with some program of morality.Logically speaking,they should havebeen lived with their owners harmoniously because they look like human beings andthey could understand human beings.However,as a matter of fact,there is a sharpconflict between machines and human beings,almost all of them are forced towithdraw from human society by suicide or being destroyed.According to professorShang,there is essential difference between machines and human beings.Humanbeings are the products of natural selection and ethical selection,they have the consciousness of good and evil.But machines are products of scientific selection,theyhave nothing but some commands,which cannot replace the biological brain ofhuman beings.So Adam—the machine cannot hold on the ethical problems aroundhim,and the fate is being destroyed by his owner Charlie(Shang,2019).Scientificselection derived from ethical selection.
Chapter TwoIndeterminacy of Ethical Identity
2.1 Failure in ethical identity construction
At the beginning of the novel,the protagonist Charlie is introduced,he is anunemployed veteran otaku and technology fan,when the artificial human Adam andEve came out,he decisively sold inheritance which was left by her mother and boughtan Adam.Obviously,he wanted to buy an Eve,but they were sold out.The firstartificial humans are 25 in total,which consisted of 12 Adam and 13 Eve,and theywere designed to look like different races.The Adam that Charlie bought was so burlythat he was mistaken for a Turkish or Greek who weighed 170 pounds and had to askhis neighbor Miranda to help carry him upstairs.
“He was compactly built,square-shouldered,dark skinned,with thick black hairswept back;narrow in the face,with a hint of hooked nose suggestive of fierceintelligence,pensively hooded eyes,tight lips that.”（McEwan,p.4）
This is the description of Adam in the text,who looks like a normal person andhas sexual functions.Charlie's original intention in buying the artificial human was tofind a companion,but Eve sold out.When Charlie set out to set up Adam,he foundthat he was a blank slate,everything had to be set according to the manual,and themanual was too boring to read.Charlie complained that god has delivered a fullyformed companion for the benefit of original Adam.But he had to devise one forhimself.
2.2 Confusion of who am I
According to the Genesis of the Bible,God once made man out of clay in hisown image and named him Adam.When Adam slept,he took a rib to make his wifeEve,so that they could live in the beautiful Eden with lush fruit trees.Adam and Evelived a carefree life in the garden.Later,they were driven out of the Garden of Edenbecause they could not resist the temptation of Satan and ate forbidden fruits.Fromthen on,they gained consciousness.By means of parody,behind the seeminglycareless content,there is a binary opposition running through the book,that is,peoplecreated by God and artificial human created by human.In the novel,human beingsalso want to get rid of the human attribute,challenge the God of Creation,and designa more perfect and modern self to enjoy the excitement of control.McEwan namedthe artificial human after Adam and Eve,and inadvertently forged a connecting linkbetween the artificial man and human beings.The depth of details is more closelyconnected with human beings,Adam’s“this wire,if you pull it out it will hurt”,whichimplies that God made Eve out of Adam’s rib in the Bible.God created man is avirtual world carefully created by McEwan,which turns all illusory beauty into realityand satisfies the pride of human creators.And Eve has one more than Adam,because Eve has the characteristics of female like,and is sold to the Middle East.When theseartificial people opened their eyes,they were already in various strange places andfaced with various people to complete their own missions,although these are alsoso-called human preferences.They never stop looking for their own identity.Theyknow that they are different from human beings,but they try to integrate into humansociety.Sometimes they are human beings,sometimes they are commodities.Theirconfusion about ethical identity has caused ethical dilemmas.And the artificial personhas no family concept.Even though Charlie is his family in the ethical sense,he stillbroke Charlie's arm for protecting himself.Even though he said he loved Mirandadeeply,he resolutely collected evidence and sent him to prison.
Chapter Three Reasons of Ethical Predicament....................................24
3.1 Complex relationship between human beings and machine..................24
3.2 Difficulty in sociability.....................28
Chapter Four Ethical Choices in Case of Predicament........................34
4.1 Awareness to moral principles.................................34
4.2 Mutual communication with machine...................................37
Chapter Five Conclusion......................................40
Chapter FourEthical Choices in Case of Predicament
4.1 Awareness to moral principles
As we all known,artificial humans were set as moral supremacy when they werecreated at the very start and they have all the good qualities.they will keep their moralprinciples When they were put into this society full of lies and deception.They wereforced to go through several ethical dilemmas and made several ethical choices here,however,the results of these ethical choices all pointed to a tragedy.Ethical dilemmais an important term in ethical literary criticism and it is a kind of ethicalpredicaments.According to professor Nie,it is difficult to make a choice in the face of ethical dilemma and it often leads to a tragedy.Adam’s ethical choice is to make achoice between two or more moral options,and different choices will lead to differentresults.
Adam has the characteristics of“machine learning”since leaving the factory,“when at night he’s rest,he’s roaming the internet,...taking in all that’s new betweenland and sky,including everything about human nature and societies”(McEwan,p.179).Adam will help Charlie make money by investing in stocks,but his moneymaking behavior is ethical and restrained.He will earn a fixed amount of moneyevery day to prevent Charlie and Miranda from becoming more lazy and lazy.Thisethical choice shows that Adam has a concept of good and evil,and his rational will isdominant.He may understand the negative impact of overnight wealth on ordinarypeople.
Chapter FiveConclusion
In Machines Like Me,the artificial humans who always adhered to moralprinciples finally gone to an end in human society,which has triggered our profoundthinking about human nature.Therefore,this paper tries to analyze the representationof predicament,reasons of predicament and ethical choices in novel by ethical literarycriticism proposed by Nie Zhenzhao.According to ethical literary criticism,this paperanalyze the changes of ethical identity in the novel firstly.Secondly,it discusses thepredicament caused by complex relationship between humans and artificial humans.Finally,it explores the ethical choices of humans and artificial humans.
The change of ethical identity always leads to ethical predicaments.The ethicalidentity of Charlie and Miranda has changed from lovers to“parents”after artificialhuman Adam came.And Adam’s identity changed from an inanimate individual intoa living and thoughtful social individual.When Charlie was mistaken for an artificialman by Miranda’s father,Charlie’s identity of owner was challenged.In thesubsequent Gorringe case,Charlie fully felt the failure of his ethical identityconstruction as the master when Adam made his own plans without negotiating withhim.In a sense,Miranda is Charlie’s mate and Adam’s mother,but she has sex withAdam and claims that he is just a machine.Adam also firmly told Charlie that he wasin love with Miranda.This is a violation of ethical taboos.Also,in the Gorringe case,Miranda felt guilty about her friend’s suicide and believed that Mariam was harmedby her promise to keep secret.In order to retaliate against the perpetrator Gorringe,she used herself as a bait to cheat Gorringe into having sex with herself,then claimedthat she was violated and sent Gorringe to prison.
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