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Social robots, fiction, and sentimentality

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Abstract

I examine the nature of human-robot pet relations that appear to involve genuine affective responses on behalf of humans towards entities, such as robot pets, that, on the face of it, do not seem to be deserving of these responses. Such relations have often been thought to involve a certain degree of sentimentality, the morality of which has in turn been the object of critical attention (Sparrow in Ethics Inf Technol 78:346–359, 2002; Blackford in Ethics Inf Technol 14:41–51, 2012). In this paper, I dispel the claim that sentimentality is involved in this type of relations. My challenge draws on literature in the philosophy of art and in cognitive science that attempts to solve the so called paradox of fictional emotions, i.e., the seemingly paradoxical way in which we respond emotionally to fictional or imaginary characters and events. If sentimentality were not at issue, neither would its immorality. For the sake of argument, however, I assume in the remaining part of the paper that sentimentality is indeed at play and bring to the fore aspects of its badness or viciousness that have not yet been discussed in connection with robot pets. I conclude that not even these aspects of sentimentality are at issue here. Yet, I argue that there are other reasons to be worried about the wide-spread use of ersatz companionship technology that have to do with the potential loss of valuable, self-defining forms of life.

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Notes

  1. In the not so distant past many would have considered these claims as betraying sentimentality towards animals. See Midgley (1979).

  2. I assume that current robotic pets merely simulate emotional and intentional states—they display the salient criterial behaviour but the internal processes that produce the relevant body movements and sounds do not bear any functional similarity to those processes that produce the criterial behavior within an animal. I do not need to consider here the further question whether at some point in the future robot pets could do more than simulate behaviour, i.e., produce the relevant behaviour on the basis of an internal process architecture that is functionally equivalent to an animal’s architecture. For discussion of this point see Seibt (2014). Note that in Seibt’s (2014) classification, the robot pets at hand here merely “approximate” affection rather than imitate it.

  3. This is Gendler’s (2013) way of putting the paradox. I am also indebted to Schneider (2006) and Neill (2005) for the following discussion of the paradox of fiction.

  4. In what follows I will only mention strategies directed at solving rather than dissolving the paradox. See Tullmann and Buckwalter (2014) for a dissolving strategy. See Cova and Teroni (2015) for a convincing reply.

  5. Coleridge (1907) is often mentioned (Charlton 1984; Gendler 2013) as possibly maintaining this view.

  6. Cova and Teroni (2015, my translation) combine these two dimensions in the following way: “…emotions inherit the correctness conditions of these cognitive bases and add an evaluative layer to them. In other words, if you are, say, visually aware of an event, then that experience is correct if and only if the event exemplifies the properties that you seem to be visually aware of. And if you react with sadness to what you see, your sadness is correct if and only if the event you see constitutes a loss.” Despite the presence of these two dimensions, the following discussion will bear solely on the cognitive basis. As we shall see, settling rationality questions at this level will be sufficient to our purposes.

  7. See Cova & Teroni (2015, Sect. 5) for this as well as another solution to the paradox of fiction.

  8. To deny this much would amount to asserting that one suspends belief that this is just a robot pet or perhaps that one is in fact emotionally engaged to a real pet counterpart or surrogate of the robot pet. We would then fall back on something akin to the second kind of strategy discussed above.

  9. As David Pugmire colourfully puts it (2005: p.125): “The problem might instead be with the very animus against sentimentality. Mightn't that reflect a discomfort with emotion as such, especially with being agitated by emotion, a kind of psychic Calvinism? What can really be wrong with sunning oneself with the mellower sentiments and bathing in kindly feelings, in making opportunities for feeling good? Recessiveness might rather lie in the curmudgeonly allergy to this. Surely it is morbid to spurn the nurturing of benign feeling where that allows itself, which, after all, it so often doesn't.”

  10. See for example the experiences reported in Collins (2004).

  11. Ruddick refers to Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Thomas Nagel as endorsing versions or elements of this view. The quote reported in the quote above is from Nagel (1969: p.13).

  12. I thank an anonymous referee for this suggestion.

  13. Once again, Van de Poel’s (2011; in press) idea of the introduction of new technologies in society as 'ongoing social experiment' that requires close monitoring and specific procedures may be very relevant here.

  14. I woudl like to thank Johanna Seibt and two anonymous referees for this journal for their extremely insightful comments, the audience at the Robophilosophy Confernce 2014 at Aarhus University, and the Velux Fonden for its generous financial support.

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Correspondence to Raffaele Rodogno.

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Rodogno, R. Social robots, fiction, and sentimentality. Ethics Inf Technol 18, 257–268 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-015-9371-z

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