Abstract:While New Materialism and Object Oriented Ontology have provided frameworks to consider human relationships to nonhuman beings and objects in the twenty-first century, scientists and authors explored similar ethical dilemmas brought about by the newly identified presence of microorganisms in what had previously been imagined as a human world at the turn of the twentieth century. This essay considers Mark Twain's later fiction alongside the work of American bacteriologist Herbert W. Conn. Already invested in undermining human exceptionalism through scalar differences in his Mysterious Stranger manuscripts (1897–1908), Twain adapts Conn's bacteriology to experiment with microbial ethics in Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes (1905). While Conn uses microbes to assert scientific mastery and professional authority, Twain uses them to experiment with ethical structures on nonhuman scales. I argue that the failures of Twain's imaginative experiment dramatize the practical challenges to radically inclusive ethical structures proposed by New Materialists and others.

中文翻译：

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微生物视角：马克吐温在伦理学上的富有想象力的实验

摘要：虽然新唯物主义和面向对象的本体论为 21 世纪考虑人类与非人类和物体的关系提供了框架，但科学家和作者探索了由新发现的微生物在先前想象的事物中的存在所带来的类似伦理困境。作为二十世纪之交的人类世界。这篇文章考虑了马克吐温后来的小说以及美国细菌学家赫伯特 W.康恩的作品。吐温已经通过他的神秘陌生人手稿（1897-1908）中的标量差异来破坏人类例外论，吐温改编康恩的细菌学以试验三千人的微生物伦理学微生物中的岁月（1905 年）。虽然 Conn 使用微生物来维护科学掌握和专业权威，吐温使用它们在非人类尺度上试验伦理结构。我认为吐温富有想象力的实验的失败使新唯物主义者和其他人提出的极端包容性伦理结构面临的实际挑战戏剧化。