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The Moral Status of Social Robots: A Pragmatic Approach

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Abstract

Debates about the moral status of social robots (SRs) currently face a second-order, or metatheoretical impasse. On the one hand, moral individualists argue that the moral status of SRs depends on their possession of morally relevant properties. On the other hand, moral relationalists deny that we ought to attribute moral status on the basis of the properties that SRs instantiate, opting instead for other modes of reflection and critique. This paper develops and defends a pragmatic approach which aims to reconcile these two positions. The core of this proposal is that moral individualism and moral relationalism are best understood as distinct deliberative strategies for attributing moral status to SRs, and that both are worth preserving insofar as they answer to different kinds of practical problems that we face as moral agents.

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Notes

  1. Following Kate Darling, I take a social robot to be “a physically embodied, autonomous agent that communicates and interacts with humans on a social level (Darling 2016, 2). Whether this definition includes chatbots and other large language models is an open question (given that these technologies are technically embodied in hardware). The pragmatic approach to moral status developed in this paper could, in principle, apply to these cases as well. Although I shall focus primarily on SRs given their centrality in recent debates.

  2. For a general discussion of the potential impact of robots within our lives, see Bostrom (2014), Darling (2016; 2021), Nørskov (2016). For a discussion of the economic impact of integrating robots into the workplace, see Ford (2015), Danaher (2017). Some writers have considered features of human–robot relations, especially sexual and romantic relations with robots (Danaher 2019; Frank and Nyholm 2017; Jecker 2021a; McArthur 2017), but also friendship (Jecker 2021b; Marti 2010) and care-giving (Sharkey and Sharkey 2010). Since the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs issued a 2017 report proposing the creation of the category of “electronic personhood,” there has been considerable discussion of the legal status of social robots. For an overview of this debate, see Parviainen and Coeckelbergh (2021).

  3. In addition to the parent–child relationship, other relationships that have been used to analogize the human–robot relation include the employee-employer relation, or the god-creature relation.

  4. In this paper, I take the term moral status to be synonymous with ‘moral standing’, ‘moral considerability’ and ‘moral patienthood’.

  5. For related characterizations of the concept of moral status, see Warren (1997), DeGrazia (2008, 183), DiSilvestro (2010, 12), and Harman (2003, 174). Jaworska and Tannenbaum (2013) offer an overview of the literature on the grounds of moral status.

  6. James Rachels describes moral individualism as “a thesis about the justification of judgements concerning how individuals may be treated. The basic idea is that how an individual may be treated is to be determined, not by considering his group memberships, but by considering his own particular characteristics” (Rachels 2005, 173).

  7. Recent exceptions include Gordon (2021) and Gordon and Gunkel (2022). I discuss their view below in Section 3.

  8. Proponents of this view include Coeckelbergh (2010, 2014, 2018, 2022a), Gordon (2021, 2022a), and Gunkel (2011, 2014, 2018).

  9. Some writers take the issue to be whether social robots will ever possess status-conferring properties, whereas others focus more on the question of whether social robots will likely soon possess those properties.

  10. In admitting that social properties are status conferring, these authors are not thereby committing themselves to a relationalist view. As I shall explain below, MR is not (necessarily) the idea that moral status is conferred by virtue of relationships. Rather it consists in both a negative (anti-individualist) dimension as well as a positive dimension, which suggests that moral status ascriptions should be arrived at through various forms of critical reflection.

  11. For a discussion of the likelihood that these technologies will be available in the (relatively) near future, see Bostrom (2014).

  12. For critical discussions of Floridi’s information ethics—especially as it bears on the questions of robot rights—see Brey (2008), Coeckelbergh (2010, 217), Gunkel (2014, 122–6) and Mosakas (2021, 436–8).

  13. See for example Andreotta (2021), Mosakas (2021), Müller (2021), and Veliz (2021). For skeptical arguments grounded in the adverse social implications of ascribing moral status to SRs see Turkle (2011) and Bryson (2009). Relatedly, others have argued that, in principle, SRs are incapable of being moral agents (Sparrow 2021).

  14. See also Mosakas (2021, 431).

  15. For a discussion, see Chalmers (1995).

  16. Andreotta does not find this line of argument convincing given its reliance on intuitions about cases for which we have no empirical support (Andreotta 2021, 27–8).

  17. The first, “AI Consciousness Test” is meant to serve as a sufficient, but not necessary condition for determining consciousness (Schneider 2019, 50). It attempts to “challenge an AI with a series of increasingly demanding natural language interactions to see how readily it can grasp and use concepts based on the internal experiences we associate with consciousness” (51). For critical discussions of Schneider’s tests, see Andreotta (2021).

  18. Neely argues that it is possible for AI to have interests even if they lack phenomenal consciousness, and that this suffices for their having moral status (Neely 2014).

  19. Another example of the inferential indeterminacy would be the question of whether consciousness is conceptually separable from notions such as intelligence or rationality. Andreotta argues that these notions are independent of one another, such that it is possible to have an intelligent machine that is not phenomenally conscious (Andreotta 2021, 22–23). But one could envision someone who denied this claim of independence.

  20. This idea is, however, not limited to metaethical constructivism, but has been developed in considerable detail within other areas of philosophy—notably feminist philosophy (Lindemann 2019, chapter 4) and pragmatism (Rorty 1989). It finds empirical support from social identity theory and self-categorization theory (Jenkins 2014).

  21. The notion of “taking on face” is one that Gunkel and Coeckelbergh derive from Emmanuel Levinas.

  22. In response, scholars have recently argued that, despite its own claims to promote a critical or reflexive attitude, MR ends up perpetuating anthropocentric biases (Gordon 2022b; Sætra 2021).

  23. In claiming that relationalists require a theory of error, I do not mean to claim that appealing to status-conferring properties to ground moral status is a universal practice. Indeed, traditional sub-Saharan African and contemporary Japanese societies do not rely on individualist intuitions (Jecker and Nakazawa 2022). My claim is that insofar as relationalists deny the legitimacy of individualist justifications, they owe an explanation not only of why these justifications are mistaken, but of how such a justificatory error became so prevalent—especially within post-enlightenment Western societies.

  24. Constrained relationalism bears important similarities to other positions within the theoretical landscape. John Danaher has recently advanced a view called ethical behaviourism (EB), according to which an entity has moral status if it consistently behaves like other entities to which we ascribe moral status (Danaher 2020). Both EB and constrained relationalism are compatible with a range of views about how moral status attributions are justified (Danaher 2020, 2024). Moreover, both views prioritize normative and epistemological questions about moral status over metaphysical ones (Danaher 2020, 2027). But whereas EB focuses on justifying empirical inquiry into an entity’s behavior as a primary means of determining its moral status, constrained relationalism focuses on a broader range of deliberative strategies, including transcendental critique, sociolinguisitic analysis, phenomenological inquiry, and so on. Constrained relationalism also shares important affinities with pluriversal approaches to ethical thought (Reiter 2018). While a detailed comparison is beyond the scope of this paper, both positions are amenable to multiple legitimate methods and forms of inquiry in ethics. They are also resistant to the assumption that all ethical questions—including those about the limits of moral considerability—admit of a single answer that holds universally.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Colin Koopman for providing feedback on an earlier draft of this paper. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their exceptionally helpful comments.

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    Paul Showler

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Showler, P. The Moral Status of Social Robots: A Pragmatic Approach. Philos. Technol. 37, 51 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-024-00737-9

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