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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In the not so distant past many would have considered these claims as betraying sentimentality towards animals. See Midgley (1979).
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.
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.
See Cova & Teroni (2015, Sect. 5) for this as well as another solution to the paradox of fiction.
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.
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.”
See for example the experiences reported in Collins (2004).
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).
I thank an anonymous referee for this suggestion.
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.
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.
References
Blackford, R. (2012). Robots and reality: A reply to robert sparrow. Ethics and Information Technology, 14, 41–51.
Broekens, J., Heerink, M., & Rosendal, H. (2009). Assistive social robots in elderly care: A review. Gerontechnology, 8(2), 94–103.
Carroll, N. (1990). The philosophy of horror; or paradoxes of the heart. New York: Routledge.
Charlton, W. (1984). Feeling for the fictitious. British Journal of Aesthetics, 24(3), 206–216.
Coleridge, S. T. (1907). Biographia Literaria, J. Shawcross (Ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6081/6081-h/6081-h.htm.
Collins, P. (2004). Not even wrong: A father’s journey into the lost history of autism. New York: Bloomsbury.
Cova, F., & Teroni, F. (2015). Le paradoxe de la fiction: le retour. In Martin Rueff & Julien Zanetta (eds.) L’expression des émotions: Mélanges en l’honneur de Patrizia Lombardo, Genève, 2015, URL: http://www.unige.ch/lettres/framo/melangeslombardo.html.
De Sousa, R. (1987). The Rationality of Emotion. Xxxx MIT Press.
de Sousa, R. (2002). Emotional truth. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 76.
de Sousa, R. (2007). Truth, authenticity, and rationailty. Dialectica XXxx, pp. 323–345.
Gendler, T. (2008a). Alief and belief. Journal of Philosophy, 105(10), 634–663.
Gendler, T. (2008b). Alief in action (and reaction). Mind and Language, 23(5), 552–585.
Gendler, T., (2013). “Imagination, Edward N. Zalta (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 Edition) http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/imagination/.
Kidd CD, Taggart W, Turkle S.(2006). A sociable robot to encourage social interaction among the elderly. In: Proceedings of ICRA 2006: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation; pp 3972–3976; doi:10.1109/ROBOT.2006.1642311.
Lamarque, P. (1981). How can we fear and pity fictions? British Journal of Aesthetics, 21(4), 291–304.
Midgley, M. (1979). Brutality and sentimentality. Philosophy, 54(209), 385–389.
Nagel, T. (1969). Sexual perversion. The Journal of Philosophy, 66, 1.
Neill, A. (2005). Art and Emotion. In J. Levinson (Ed.), The oxford handbook of aesthetics (pp. 421–435). New York: Oxford University Press.
Nussbaum, M. (1997). Cultivating humanity: A classical defense of reform in liberal education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Nussbaum, M. (2001). Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Paskins, B. (1977). “On being moved by Anna Karenina and Anna Karenina”. Philosophy, 52, 344–347.
Prinz, J. (2004). Gut reactions: A perceptual theory of emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pugmire, D. (2005). Sound sentiments. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Radford, C. (1975). How can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplemental, 49, 67–80.
Ruddick, S. (1975). Better sex. In R. B. Baker & F. A. Elliston (Eds.), Philosophy and sex (pp. 83–104). Buffalo: Prometheus.
Russell, D. (2012). Human happiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Salmela, M. (2006). True emotion. Philosophical Quarterly, 56(224), 382–405.
Schneider, S., (2006). “The Paradox of Fiction,” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/fict-par.htm.
Seibt, J. (2014). Varieties of the“As-if”: Five ways to simiulate an action. In: J. Seibt, R. Hakli, M. Nørskov, Sociable robots and the future of social relations. Proceedings of Robo-Philosophy 2014, IOS-Press, Amsterdam. pp. 97–105.
Sharkey, A. J. C., & Sharkey, N. E. (2012). Granny and the robots: Ethical issues in robot care for the elderly. Ethics and Information Technology, 14, 27–40.
Smith, M. (1995). Film spectatorship and the institution of fiction. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53(2), 113–127.
Snyder, C. R., & Higgins, R. L. (1988). Excuses: Their effective role in the negotiation of reality. Psychological Bulletin, 104, 23–35.
Sparrow, R. J. (2002). The march of the robot dogs. Ethics and Information Technology, 78(3), 346–359.
Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193–210.
Teroni, F. (2007). Emotions and formal objects. Dialectica, 61(3), 395–415.
Tullmann, K., & Buckwalter, W. (2014). Does the paradox of fiction exist? Erkenntnis, 79, 779–796.
Van de Poel, I. (2011). Nuclear energy as a social experiment. Ethics, Policy, and the Environment, 14(3), 285–290.
Van de Poel, I. (in press). Society as a laboratory to experiment with new technologies. In E. Stokes, D. Bowman & A. Rip (Eds.), Embedding and governing new technologies. Singapore: Pan Stanford Publishing.
Wada, K., & Shibata, T. (2007). living with seal robots— its sociopsychological and physiological influences on the elderly at a care house. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 23(5), 972–980.
Walton, K. (1978). Fearing fictions. Journal of Philosophy, 75(1), 5–27.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rodogno, R. Social robots, fiction, and sentimentality. Ethics Inf Technol 18, 257–268 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-015-9371-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-015-9371-z