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If Animals have Rights, Should Robots?

15/4/2019

We all think that animals have at least some rights, though there are different opinions about exactly why they do so. Some say it is because of their sentience, some because of rationality, and some because of our sympathy. But robots are getting smarter and smarter these days, and some people [for example here, also attached below] are beginning to seriously ask whether these sorts of reasons apply to robots as well. Are they sentient? Are they rational? Certainly, some robots are pretty cute. So we ask, if animals have rights, should robots?

Nathan Heller, "If Animals have Rights, Should Robots?"
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Joe M

15/4/2019 11:03:38 am

Heller asks: if animals have rights, should robots? It depends on why animals have rights (and, ultimately, why humans have rights).

Because they can suffer? Humans suffer. We all think that we should consider someone's pain when acting (and for the most part we do), and in that sense we have a "right" not to suffer. But animals suffer too. And there is no morally relevant difference, Singer claims, between the pain in a human and a like pain in an animal, and so we should consider that animal's pain equally when acting. But robots, even the ones that (who?) do clever things (do they, really, or is that just projecting?) because of machine learning, do not suffer (I presume they are not conscious), and so this does not apply to them.

Because they are rational? Humans have a rational will, the ability to reason about what is good or bad, and then act on that basis. Kant reckons that is what makes us ends-in-ourselves, and what gives us rights never to be treated as a mere thing, and sometimes to be helped in our actions. But animals don't have rational wills, since they do not think in terms of good or bad (presumably), and so this doesn't apply to them.

Korsgaard is not Kant, but she is a Kantian. She reckons that what gives us rights to respect is, a bit more generally, that our actions are motivated by our "experienc[ing] stuff as good or bad", which is a trait that animals do share with humans. (The way she sees it, presumably, is that experiencing something as good does not imply any capacity to judge that it is good, as such.) Even so, this still doesn't apply to robots, since they don't experience anything at all.

Because we have sympathy? We sympathize with humans. We sympathize with (some) animals. And, it seems, we sympathize with (some) robots—it really was amusing to read of a reporter's being "devastated" by the "death" of hitchBOT, and of the army colonel who thought blowing off the legs of a centipede-like robot, one by one as it trod on landmines, was "inhumane"! There might be something to this, but not enough to give robots (or animals) rights.

As these examples show very well, we can't seem to control how our sympathies operate. If we sympathetic to humans, we will be sympathetic to animals and to lifelike robots, in much the same ways (eg, when they are in front of us), though perhaps to different degrees. And if not, not. Its a package deal: sympathy for them all, or for none. Obviously, we should buy the package deal, and this means we will rightly continue to have sympathy for lifelike robots, even though they do not suffer or experience anything.

But this does not mean that robots have rights. First, Singer points out, we are not sympathetic to all robots (just the cute ones), nor to all animals (just our pets), and therefore sympathy is hardly the appropriate basis for a system of rights. Second, and more importantly, the reason for not "harming" lifelike robots has more to do with our characters than their "welfare", and this shows we are actually not interested in rights for them at all.

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