Shifting Perspectives
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Shifting Perspectives David J. Gunkel1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
The essay “Blame-Laden Moral Rebukes and the Morally Competent Robot: A Confucian Ethical Perspective” offers readers an innovative and potentially useful shift of perspective in AI/robot ethics. As the author accurately recognizes, the vast majority of work in the field—efforts that have been, for better or worse, organized around European/Christian moral traditions (i.e. utilitarianism, deontologism, virtue ethics, etc.)—tend to focus on the individual moral agent and therefore get hung up on questions regarding qualifying criteria for moral agency and status, i.e. personhood, consciousness, sentience, empathy, etc. The Confucian perspective mobilized by this contribution shifts the focus from the internal properties of the individual moral entity to the “moral ecology” of the human–robot system and the role that moral correctives or rebukes play in the management of this complex and multifaceted arrangement. The operative question that guides the inquiry is not whether robots in general or an individual robot in particular can be a moral agent but whether and to what extent an interactive artifact contributes to the development of a flourishing moral ecology within the context of human–robot social relationships. My response to this significant shift in perspective will target and address three items: First, I want to connect-the-dots between the concept of “rhetorical agency” that is mobilized in the essay and recent innovations in the field of communication studies, specifically a new research paradigm called “Human Machine Communication” (HMC). Second, I will examine how the Confucian “role-based ethics” that is profiled in the text not only reproduces the decisive pivot that organizes the “social relational ethics” that Mark Coeckelbergh and I have developed and interjected into the field but also supplements those efforts by providing something that has been perceived to be absent or underdeveloped with the “relational turn.” Third, I will end with a corrective or, more accurately stated, a rebuke, which is offered not in an effort to identify and call attention to fault but to assist the further cultivation and refinement of the essay’s argument. All three comments, then, are designed to open lines of communication and to facilitate dialogue. They are, in other words, presented here in the spirit of what the essay characterizes as “Confucian friendship.” * David J. Gunkel [email protected] 1
Department of Communication, Northern Illinois University, Reavis Hall, 112, Dekalb, IL 60115, USA
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D. J. Gunkel
Communication and Artificial Intelligence Unlike the majority of published work in the field of AI/robot ethics, which typically begins by inquiring about the characteristics or internal properties of the robot in order to determine whether it is or is not a legitimate moral agent, “Blame-Laden Moral Rebukes” focuses attention on the social circumstances in which the robot is situated and operates. What matters,
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