If a sex robot is a robot is a robot with whom (or which) we can have sex, then we need to know what it is to have sex with a robot. In order to know this, we need to know what it is to have sex, and what a robot is. This chapter examines the first question, what is it to have sex. It argues that having sex can be understood as a an epitome of being sexual together in much the same way having a conversation can be understood as an epitome of what Paul Grice calls a “talk exchange”. The answer to this question sheds some light on the second by telling us some of the criteria a robot would have to meet before we could plausibly have sex with it. The chapter concludes that as long as the sex robots in question do not exercise real agency, then sexual relationships between human beings will continue to offer something that sexual activity involving the sex robots does not.

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The idea of a double-aspect approach to a philosophical conundrum is familiar in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind and has been recently introduced as well into epistemology. As a class, double-aspect theories attempt, as it might be put, reconciliation by reorientation. Matter and mind, for double-aspect theorists, are not independent substances, whose co-presence in a single entity such as a human person might be deeply mysterious; they are different aspects of a single substance — a person in modest versions of the theory like Strawson's, the universe as a whole in Spinoza's more ambitious case. Similarly, according to Susan Haack, the epistemic justification of a belief of a given subject is not something conceptually isolated from a causal explanation of its presence, but rather epistemic justification has two aspects, a causal one concerned with what a subject's evidence for a belief is, and an evaluative one concerned with how good the subject's evidence is.

Jesse Prinz contrasts Nietzsche's way of historicizing morals with the approaches of utilitarians and Marxist-materialists, and does so to good effect. Against a background of substantial agreement on most of what Prinz argues for, I elucidate a significant shortcoming of his interpretation of Nietzschean genealogy: namely, its reliance on a simplistic understanding of how and why Nietzsche integrates historical hypotheses about how morality emerged and developed with critical warnings about where it seems to be headed. Using Nietzsche's teasing remarks about “the English psychologists” in the opening sections of GM I as a foil, I develop an account of the difference between a simple history of morals and a true, Nietzschean genealogy of morals that does a better job than Prinz does here of achieving his stated goal of identifying the advantages of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals over the utilitarian and Marxist-materialist versions.