Chapter 3 - Wittgensteinian Considerations of the Moral Status of Robots

Summary

In this chapter, I consider a Wittgensteinian response to recent arguments in favour of granting social robots rights. In particular, I propose that we adopt a Wittgensteinian approach to both the notion of evidence and to considerations of what it means to do the same thing as. I argue that a Wittgensteinian perspective of these tools can help to bring clarity to our thinking about social robots.

I consider two plausible categories of arguments for robot rights which I call the argument from empathy and the argument from performative equivalence. Bringing Wittgensteinian considerations to these arguments is illuminating as it calls into doubt conclusions that we might otherwise reach regarding how to categorize robots.

The Argument from Empathy

There is much evidence standing in support of the fact we have an empathetic emotional response to social robots when we engage with them: we feel stressed and emotionally upset when we witness them being ‘harmed’, we make moves to protect them, we anthropomorphize and are inclined to include them in human-like social practices. On the one hand this is a good thing, and something to be encouraged. It is through our emotional engagement with robots that we gain social benefits. It is only if we feel that robots are like friends, companions and entities to be trusted that they will be able to play a social role (Sweeney 2022). For example, it has been shown that introducing companion robots into a care home can bring many benefits for the residents, but the benefits only come if the residents see the robot as a social entity and not simply a device or tool (Sorell and Draper 2014; Pirhonen et al. 2019).

On the other hand, when people do have feelings towards social robots this raises ethical questions. Usually, when we have feelings for a being we have a duty to be kind towards it and a further duty to ensure that it is protected from harm from others. And it seems that we do have some such protective instinct towards social robots. Kate Darling reports undertaking a study in which she asked a group of participants to destroy a collection of small Pleo robot dinosaurs and they were not only extremely reluctant to do so, they showed signs of genuine distress at the prospect (Darling 2016).