In this balancing act, we cannot ignore that it is whether we consider Adam human that ultimately tips the scale. McEwan masterfully delivers us to a point of unstable equilibrium, where we are forced to examine moral judgments intuitively and then rationally, bouncing unrestfully between contradictory conclusions. If this conclusion seems unsatisfying, the means by which McEwan delivers it are not: a brilliant manoeuvre toward the end exposes some of our fundamental assumptions about morality and how beings are increasingly excluded from our moral considerations in correlation to their decreasing humanity (e.g., it is easier to kill a fly than a dog because the fly is less human). It is in the absurdity of the eventual actions of the humanoid robot that we are lead to evaluate what is means to be human. Dick in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? If Dick singled out empathy as the essence of what it means to be human, McEwan has his gaze set on moral judgment. This has been effectively covered (by several authors, but perhaps most famously) by Philip K. I feared this would be an attempt at a theme in my opinion already exhaustively explored examining what truly makes us human by means of blurring the line between man and machine.
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