Q&A: Rights of Non-Organic Consciousness
Rights of Non-Organic Consciousness
Question
Hello Rabbi, I recently watched a series that tried to present an imaginary scenario, but one that in our world really could happen. The scenario is this:
A world in which there are robots with completely human consciousness, with only one limitation: the inability to harm a human being (that is, not fully human consciousness). They live among us as ordinary people do—robot and non-robot couples living next door to each other, maybe even “mixed couples.” They have emotions and respond to the world in a completely human way, perhaps even more so than we do. There are people fighting for robot rights, such as the right to adopt a child (subject to the no-harm rule), really as though they were an organism, and so on.
Would we, in such a world, be ethically obligated to respect their rights?
Does the very fact that this consciousness is limited mean that it is not fully human consciousness, and therefore we would not take them into account under a categorical imperative, despite their being “alive” in a shared organism?
And on the religious side: am I obligated toward them in matters between man and his fellow, or is that dependent on the “image of God” within a being?
(In the series, a robot also harms a human, but on inspection it turns out that it did not violate the no-harm condition. Apparently they grasp the concept of “human” on a level higher than a human being does.)
Answer
I don’t have the tools to discuss this. One would have to live in such a situation in order to form a position about it.