Of course there is and very well described in evolutionary science

You can explain why our survival instinct evolved so it is tempting to jump to the conclusion that we ought to survive but it is a fallacy (called the naturalistic fallacy): saying that something being natural means it is good.

That's a recurring theme in Ghost in the Shell, at least the anime series. That as the line between human and machine is blurred, the general trend is in the direction of homogeneity, but here and there you still see people doing "deontological" things, ostensibly as a grasp at uniqueness to preserve self.

An interesting thought occurs to me though, with the proliferation of various NN architectures, and the idea that such nets, if scaled and installed to power humanoid robots, would effectively learn different heuristics after training on chaotically different data, it's quite possible that machines will also gradually evolve individuality and something rather close to personality.

Perhaps individuality is an intrinsic, emergent property in any system of generally intelligent and learning agents. Like a 3+ body on steroids, millions, if not billions of dimensions.

Also interesting to consider that the emergence of uniqueness among a system of said agents seems to increase entropy, a presently unique to life property given that everything inanimate in the universe does exactly the opposite. The more I think of general AI, the more I have trouble distinguishing it from the only other sentient intelligence we know of.