Should Robots Have Rights?

Robotic development in today’s society is premature, in its infancy at its best. However, the rise of robots in the age of innovation and exemplary technological progress has led to an increase in exploration of the role of robots in our daily lives through media such as film, poetry and other creative industries. Although robots are clearly not sufficiently developed to deserve rights at the moment, questions such as whether robots could eventually be advanced enough to have human rationality prompt the notion of whether robots should have rights. This essay will argue that the key characteristic of humans that give them rights is their rationality: the ability to use reason to comprehend rights and their importance. If robots similarly acquire these characteristics, it would suggest that they are also deserving of rights. This essay defines ‘robots’ as technological constructs that are designed to emulate human behaviour, and so the definition excludes constructs such as robotic arms and other more traditional machines. For the sake of clarity, ‘rights’ refer to moral principles that describe certain standards of human behaviour and are protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

Humans deserve rights because, as a species, we have reason and rationality. Universal human rights originate in the acknowledgement that natural rights are inalienable because humans are assumed to have rationality, which is the ability to realise the importance of rights through reason. There are 30 articles in the UDHR that define said rights and the most important of those are the rights to equality, life, liberty and social security. Humans are deserving of ‘human rights’ as they have expressed their desire and fought for said rights as a species, which requires both rationality and emotion. In human society, all members are protected by these rights, because the alienation of anyone from these rights would create logical inconsistencies such that rights and society itself would no longer be. Since we are only able to identify these logical inconsistencies through reason, we are hence deserving of rights by virtue of our rationality. As Kant argued in his principles of ethics, under the principle of universalizability, an action is only permissible if it can be applied universally without logical contradictions. This is his concept of the categorical imperative. For example, an act of murder is not permissible because if applied universally, it would result in no life at all, resulting in no society. Laws that protect humans from murders in turn create a universal right to life. Thus, immoral actions that create logical inconsistencies should be prohibited, which creates rights that are universally protected by laws and which we deserve because we have rationality and can reason.

The distinction between animals and humans lies in the fact that humans are members of society with rationality, meaning the denial of our rights would be met with opposition within society from individuals with reason that seeks to secure our rights. Most animals are only capable of experiencing emotions such as pain and fear, which are purely driven by their survival instinct, and they lack the rationality necessary to identify the logical inconsistencies created by certain immoral acts. Therefore, in regards to most species, we only have indirect duties not to develop immoral dispositions by the cruel mistreatment of them. [1] However, it is undeniable that some species have higher levels of intelligence compared to others and hence might be deserving of certain rights. In principle, a species deserves certain rights based on their level of rationality, which dictates the degree of rights they are able to comprehend. Recent experiments in the Yerkes National Primate Centre [2] showed that monkeys refused to eat after witnessing undeservingly high wages given to their companions for performing the same task. This experiment implied that monkeys had an innate sense of justice in economic terms and are able to comprehend the importance of equal economic rights. Under the criteria raised in this essay, all monkeys should undisputedly be granted equal treatment economically amongst those held in human captivity, for they have displayed capabilities to comprehend the importance of economic rights. On the other hand, if the monkeys do not express their desire for other rights through reason and rationality , they would not be similarly deserving of those rights as humans are because they lack the reason to comprehend them.

When considering robots, where do they lie in the spectrum from animals to humans in terms of their capability to reason? Current robots take the form of lines of code in a computer programme or robotic arms in factories. They are incapable of independent thought beyond the tasks they were programmed to carry out and do not even experience emotions like animals do, making them insentient beings. However, the rapid technological progress witnessed in the last century means we should not rule out the possibility that robots may one day develop to possess said qualities. Therefore, when robots start to develop reasoning abilities as other members of our society do, in ways that animals could not, denying them rights will cause the same logical inconsistencies if we deny certain humans from human rights. The question then becomes, how do we define the threshold that robots need to cross in order to be deserving of human rights? It is difficult to determine which generation of robots are fundamentally part of society, such that denial of their rights would create logical incompatibilities that cannot be universalised. However, by observing how human rights came to become under the protection of laws and institutions, it can be said that the abilities to consider, contemplate and comprehend the intrinsic value of rights, are crucial determining factors towards whether a robot is deserving of rights.

In practice, the ability to understand the intrinsic value of rights can be displayed through active physical actions for change or passive verbal dissent. The accepted motives behind the display of the understanding of rights by robots, should be defiance or principled resistance towards oppressive behaviour by humans. This is similar to what we have observed from experiments carried out on monkeys in the Yerkes National Primate Centre. Motives would be rejected if they are driven by pure self-interest or survival instincts. Moreover, the conclusions that they arrive at, with respect to rights, must not be inhibited and compromised since creation, and are to be performed independently and not programmed through lines of code. We recognize the need for robots to have rights in this early stage of their development, because there is a difference between being hypothetically deserving of and realistically securing human rights. While in theory, humans deserve rights, these rights were not guaranteed and were instead secured by people who sought change. Human rights should not be taken for granted - evidently, there are still humans to this day living without their rights protected. Thus, when robots are sufficiently developed, established protocols and the criterion are required to ensure that we can verify that they are indeed deserving of rights and guarantee an easy transition to a society with robots.

In conclusion, robots in this day and age are still immature and are not deserving of rights. However, this is not to deny their potential to be deserving of human rights. Though robots, unlike animals, are insentient and lack rationality, they are capable of rapid improvement through technological progress. The act of expressing a desire for equal treatment or rights reflects the ability to understand through reason the concept of rights and why they are important. A robot with such abilities will hence be advanced enough to be a rational member of society whose rights are undeniable, because to deny them rights would be the same as denying the rights of humans. The acknowledgement that robots deserve rights would also benefit social groups that have been historically oppressed, because it would entrench the view that all members of society are deserving of human rights because logical inconsistencies would otherwise result. A debate as such must be settled early on, before factionalism and partisan divides over the issue are created. Robots do not deserve rights currently, but that may change in the future.

[1] Moral Theory: The Fundamentals Ethics: The Fundamentals. Julia Driver. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007 p.97.

[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/monkeys-humans-common-innate-sense-economic-justice#:~:text=The%20experiment%20implied%20that%20monkeys,value%20fairness%20of%20some%20kind