Charles Ess: University of Oslo, NO

Phronēsis plays a critical and unique role in ethical judgments – including, as Gerdes [1] has discussed, in the exceptionally fraught context of warfare. I draw on Gerdes and Sullins [2,3] to further highlight the role of phronēsis as a virtue that – along with deontological commitments to equality and respect for persons, and loving as itself a virtue – is required for what Sara Ruddick [4] characterizes as “complete sex.” In Ruddick’s terms, we may turn to future sexbots for good sex: but as phronēsis, along with first-person phenomenal consciousness [5] and genuine emotions, including desire, remain computationally intractable, sexbots cannot offer human partners the virtue of genuine loving, mutuality of desire, and equal respect for persons as the necessary conditions of complete sex. A key upshot of this analysis is the recognition that complete sex entails virtues that we risk losing if we only have robots as sex partners: in Vallor’s terms [6], sexbots thus threaten humans with an ethical deskilling – a loss of virtues, including phronēsis, that are necessary for human love and friendship. As Bringsjord et al [5] put it, robots lacking first-person phenomenal consciousness can be likened to zombies. On this analogy, the risk of ethical deskilling is to say that sexual engagements solely with a zombie lover threaten to turn us into one as well. 

[1] Anne Gerdes, Ethical Issues Concerning Lethal Autonomous Robots in Warfare. In J. Seibt, R. Hakli, and M. Nørskov (eds.), Sociable Robots and the Future of Social Relations: Proceedings of Robo-Philosophy 2014, Berlin, IOS Press, 2014, 277-289.

[2] John Sullins, Machine Morality Operationalized. In J. Seibt, R. Hakli, and M. Nørskov (eds), Sociable Robots and the Future of Social Relations: Proceedings of Robo-Philosophy 2014, 7. Berlin, IOS Press, 2014.

[3] John Sullins. Robots, Love, and Sex: The Ethics of Building a Love Machine, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Vol. 3, no. 4 (October-December 2012), 398-409.

[4] Sara Ruddick. Better Sex. In Robert Baker and Frederick Elliston (eds.) Philosophy and Sex, Amherst, NY, Prometheus Books.1975, 280-299.   

[5] Selmer Bringsjord, John Licato, Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu, Rikhiya Ghosh, and Atriya Sen. Real Robots that Pass Human Tests of Self-Consciousness. Proceedings of RO-MAN 2015 (The 24th International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication), August 31-September 4, 2015. Kobe, Japan.[5] Sara Ruddick. Better Sex. In Robert Baker and Frederick Elliston (eds.) Philosophy and Sex, Amherst, NY, Prometheus Books.1975, 280-299.   

[6] Shannon Vallor, Carebots and Caregivers: Sustaining the Ethical Ideal of Care in the Twenty-First Century. Philosophy of Technology 24 (2011), 251–268.