Abstract

This paper examines Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me as a contemporary re-configuration of the British ethical novel in the context of artificial intelligence and posthuman thought. It argues that the novel extends the ethical tradition of British fiction by introducing a non-human moral agent—an android named Adam—whose presence fundamentally destabilizes conventional assumptions about subjectivity, moral judgment, and ethical responsibility. Rather than abandoning the realist and introspective foundations of the ethical novel, McEwan transforms them by integrating machine intelligence into the narrative structure of moral inquiry. The study situates the novel within the broader tradition of the British ethical novel, which has long been concerned with the representation of moral dilemmas, the complexity of human judgment, and the limits of ethical understanding. In this framework, Machines Like Me both inherits and revises established conventions by placing human and artificial agents within a shared ethical field. The analysis focuses on three key dimensions. First, it explores moral narrative and judgment, highlighting how interactions among characters produce competing ethical perspectives shaped by emotion, rationality, and algorithmic consistency. Second, it investigates the tension between human fallibility and machine rationality, particularly in relation to truth, responsibility, and moral decision-making. Third, it examines human–machine subject boundaries, arguing that the presence of artificial intelligence challenges anthropocentric models of subjectivity and reveals the instability of fixed definitions of moral agency. The paper concludes that Machines Like Me redefines the British ethical novel as a dynamic site of ethical negotiation in which human and machine forms of reasoning coexist and conflict, ultimately reshaping the foundations of moral judgment in contemporary literature.