Mark Coeckelbergh — professor of philosophy of media and technology at the University of Vienna and member of the EU High-Level Expert Group on AI — develops a relational approach to robot ethics. It is not intrinsic properties (consciousness, rationality, the capacity to suffer) that constitute moral status, but the social relations in which a being stands.
Key Contribution
In Robot Rights? Towards a Social-Relational Justification of Moral Consideration (2010), Coeckelbergh argues: because we can never directly grasp the intrinsic state of consciousness of an other, moral regard is always a matter of relation. When human beings develop emotional bonds with care or companion robots, there arises — so Coeckelbergh — a morally relevant claim that does not depend on whether the robot in itself suffers or feels.
Coeckelbergh thereby advocates a form of ontological agnosticism: instead of asking what is a robot?, he asks how do we encounter it?. This permits a morally extensible language, but decouples it from the ground of being.
Significance for the Ontology of the Person — Critical Assessment
The ontology of the person rejects Coeckelbergh’s approach in principle. The decisive difference lies in the fact that, in the case of real persons, dignity and moral status are not relationally but ontologically grounded: the person is to be affirmed for her own sake — because she is a person, not because someone encounters her (Personalistic Norm). A relational approach threatens to invert precisely this: moral status becomes a function of perception.
The practical consequences are grave:
- An embryo that can maintain no social relation would be relationally morally irrelevant.
- A comatose patient without discernible responsiveness would lose his entitlement to moral regard.
- Conversely, humanoid robots with which human beings form emotional bonds would nominally acquire moral claims.
This is exactly the inflation of the concept of person against which Bryson warns and which the ontology of the person identifies as oblivion of the person. The encounter with a robot can trigger genuine feelings — these feelings are real — but they constitute no dignity in the robot. Rather, they reveal the personal depth of the human being.
Place in the Book
In the book, Coeckelbergh is the methodologically most careful representative of the counter-position. His analysis forces the ontology of the person to sharpen its own position: why are intrinsic properties morally decisive, and not relations? The answer: because the relation proceeds from a being-a-bearer — Prote Energeia — that precedes all relating. Agere sequitur esse: even comportment presupposes a being that comports itself.
See also
- AI Ethics
- Humanoid Robot
- Care Robot
- Personalistic Norm
- Dignity
- Personhood
- Someone
- Relational Concept of Person
- Substance-Ontological-Relational Concept of Person
- Joanna Bryson
- Luciano Floridi
Sources: Coeckelbergh, Mark (2010): “Robot Rights? Towards a Social-Relational Justification of Moral Consideration”. Ethics and Information Technology 12(3), pp. 209–221.
Further sources:
- Coeckelbergh, Mark (2012): Growing Moral Relations: Critique of Moral Status Ascription. Palgrave Macmillan.
- Coeckelbergh, Mark (2020): AI Ethics. MIT Press (MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series).
- Coeckelbergh, Mark (2022): The Political Philosophy of AI: An Introduction. Polity Press.
- Coeckelbergh, Mark / Gunkel, David J. (2014): “Facing Animals: A Relational, Other-Oriented Approach to Moral Standing”. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 27(5), pp. 715–733.