Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
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Robot Rights and Ethics
The Rights of Robots
To many people the notion of robots having rights is unthinkable, irre-
spective of whether one speaks from an “everything is alive perspective”
or an “only man is alive” viewpoint. Yet as Christopher Stone argues,
in an article with the intriguing title “Should Trees Have Standing?—
Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects”, throughout legal history each
successive extension of rights to some new entity has been, to some ex-
tent, unthinkable:
Human history is the history of exclusion and power. Humans have
defined numerous groups as less than human: slaves, woman, the
“other races”, children and foreigners. These are the wretched who
have been defined as, stateless, personless, as suspect, as rightless.
This is the present realm of robotic rights. [1]
And speaking of living things, there is no evidence that plants or trees,
for example, are conscious, but that is not to say that we have no moral
duty to them. That the subject of robot rights deserves serious attention
is attested to by the fact that it has been debated by,
inter alia
, the judi-
ciary of the state of Hawaii, which has developed a “Futures Research”
component that investigates the rights of robots.
Should Robots Have Civil and Legal Rights?
Within a few decades robots will be in almost every home, cooking,
cleaning, doing our drudge work. But what will happen if they evolve
to such an extent that they do not actually want to do our drudge work?
Do we have any right to enslave them simply because they are not hu-
man? Is it fair and reasonable to deprive them of an existence full of
pleasure and relaxation? Are we able to program a robot to have a soul
and, if so, should we have the right to exercise influence and control
over that soul? Even worse, if our robots have souls, do we have the
right to switch off their souls if the mood takes us, or is that murder? If
