Robot rights? Towards a social-relational justification of moral consideration

Abstract

Should we grant rights to artificially intelligent robots? Most current and near-future robots do not meet the hard criteria set by deontological and utilitarian theory. Virtue ethics can avoid this problem with its indirect approach. However, both direct and indirect arguments for moral consideration rest on ontological features of entities, an approach which incurs several problems. In response to these difficulties, this paper taps into a different conceptual resource in order to be able to grant some degree of moral consideration to some intelligent social robots: it sketches a novel argument for moral consideration based on social relations. It is shown that to further develop this argument we need to revise our existing ontological and socialpolitical frameworks. It is suggested that we need a social ecology, which may be developed by engaging with Western ecology and Eastern worldviews. Although this relational turn raises many difficult issues and requires more work, this paper provides a rough outline of an alternative approach to moral consideration that can assist us in shaping our relations to intelligent robots and, by extension, to all artificial and biological entities that appear to us as more than instruments for our human purposes.

The other question: can and should robots have rights?

“…Consequently, the question of social and moral status does not necessarily depend on what the other is in its essence but on how she/he/it (and the pronoun that comes to be deployed in this situation is not immaterial) supervenes before us and how we decide, in "the face of the other" (to use Levinasian terminology), to respond. In this transaction, the "relations are prior to the things related" (Callicott 1989, p. 110), instituting what Gerdes (2015, following Coeckelbergh (2010), has called "a relational turn" in ethics. 8 From the outset, this Levinasian influenced, relational ethic might appear to be similar to that developed by Kate Darling.…”

Can we trust robots?

“…In recent work I have argued that from a phenomenological point of view, robots may appear as more than machines and that this has consequences for ethics of robotics: a relational, social, and phenomenological approach helps us to better understand human-robot relations and the ethical problems they raise (Coeckelbergh 2009a(Coeckelbergh , 2009b(Coeckelbergh , 2010a(Coeckelbergh , 2010b(Coeckelbergh , 2010c(Coeckelbergh , 2010d. Thus, here the question is not whether or not robots are agents (individual-ontological approach) but how they appear and how that appearance is shaped by, and shapes, the social (social-relational approach).…”

You, robot: on the linguistic construction of artificial others

“…In previous work, I proposed a social-phenomenological approach to philosophy of robotics, which focuses on the philosophical relevance of robotic appearance and of human-robot relations as social relations (Coeckelbergh 2009(Coeckelbergh , 2010a. In this paper, I wish to further develop this approach by exploring the potential benefits of a linguistichermeneutic turn in philosophy of robotics.…”