Well, as most of you know, of course they are, and we have seen it since yesterday, in fact,
there are never any debates about the question of who or what has small standing amongst small philosophers.
And in fact, all celebration is of varied persuasions in recent time times.
I think much of this has been triggered by political arguments over the rights or lack thereof of non-human sentient animals as well,
of course, as questions about human foetuses and embryos.
Proponents of the view that sentence non-human animals have defensible more rights rights claims defend their stance,
typically, but arguing that these animals can be wrong,
morally relevant ways by moral agents like ourselves because they have interests that are the results of certain capacities like our own.
So typically then what motivates rights claims and claims of moral standing are particular capacities for animals that are like ours.
And given that it's only fair to treat like a like or to give equal consideration to something that is relevantly equal,
it's defensible to argue that, for instance, sentient animals should be treated in a manner that is comparable to sentient humans,
at least as far as infliction of pain and suffering is concerned.
So everything hinges here, then on a non-human entity having capacities that are comparable to our own.
The idea, essentially is this I can experience pain,
which typically the suffering a given sentient non-human animal has the same capacity or similar capacity.
It responds, in fact, to pain inducing stimuli in a manner similar to how I would respond.
I assume, like humans like me, prefer to avoid pain and suffering.
So the assumption is that essential non-human animals responds to pain inducing stimuli like us.
To try to avoid them suggests that like us, they prefer not to experience that.
So the infliction of pain and suffering then on these sentient non-human animals appears not to be a more useful activity.
And so seeing that because it inflicts pain and suffering on them and so results in us harming them if we do so regardless.
Based on the variety of this argument, many has cut moral standing to send in non-human animals.
But why does it matter really who we ascribe moral standing to?
And I think you might be able to get a good indication of the significance of the answers
to these kinds of questions by undertaking a search on your favourite online search engine,
such as, for instance, Google Scholar. A lot of people have a lot of different ideas about the question of who or what's moral standing.
So what I wanted to start off with was just to clear a little bit of ground because in my own mind,
when I started writing this to explain how I understand moral standing,
it seems to me at least, and this is not tied to controversial what I'm saying here.
Whoever has the moral standing is somebody who can be morally wrong for actions undertaken by moral agents.
And moral agent is someone who has the capacity to distinguish between what is morally right and what is morally wrong.
So if you have moral standing animal agents, agents, my actions affecting you can be morally right or wrong or neutral.
If something has no moral standing, whatever it is that I do or don't do to it, that affects it, has no moral implications.
So. If we agree, then, that a stone has no moral standing, me kicking the stone along the road is small,
inconsequential at least as far as a stone and as far as the universe is concerned.
So if you think then that non-human animals or people with certain disabilities or androids have no moral standing,
your treatment of them, whatever you might choose to do or not to do would all other things being equal and morally neutral activity.
L.A. County has suggested that we should distinguish between wild status and moral standing.
Between saying that something is not standing simply means that it counts more in its own right.
However, the moral status of entities that have more standing might not necessarily be the same.
And then when we can get into these hierarchies, if you want to, you know that people have discussed here and is probably in line with the kind of
hierarchy of ranking that Ruth and Tom try to get worked out by means of a large grant.
Now, some beings with more standing might have a higher or lower moral status than others other beings, swift also moral standing and in brackets.
As far as I can see again, this depends entirely on how they relate to our own capacities.
Nothing else comes. It just happened. It doesn't happen in our universe of analysis,
so we can then if any number of arguments about the normative grounds on which we could base such rankings.
But it's not unheard of in your philosophy that sentient persons are seen as having a higher status than central non-person.
Why is that? Because they are paradigmatic human beings. They are like us.
And of course, as Sarah explained in response to Michael's question yesterday,
they had to be on the top of our pecking order off the greasy pole of moral status.
And that seems no surprise to me, I think, to align with one's intuition, said many of us share, because this approach could,
for instance, lead us to grant sentience, non-human animals, small standing and moral status conceding.
This would still permit us then, as we have seen here, to disagree vigorously about the question of whether a non-human animal small status should be
the same as that of a human being with similar intellectual capacities so that if a person,
what seems uncontroversial to Buchanan is that more statist admits of degrees.
Ann Warren in her book on moral status obligations to Person, other living things, on the other hand,
seems to propose that we should use more status and more standing interchangeably
because to have more status is to be morally considerable or to have moral standing.
And yet she still finds herself in the business of wanting to create pecking orders.
And so in fact, us, when similar to sentiment, is both a necessary and sufficient condition for establishing moral status.
Status comes in degrees depending on the being's capacity for sentience, so flies would find themselves lower in the pecking order than picks.
And if you ask me to join the camp, I would probably get a membership card for summer camp.
But of course, what personhood should Trump sentence?
It's never quite clear, except when we realise that those who make those determinations of people who happen to be also persons.
So it probably can't hurt, then to place oneself on top of whatever pecking order one creates.
We are very good at that. Now if we take the debate about centre non-human animals as our starting point.
It becomes clear that many of the arguments about moral standing, as well as some old status as strongly,
if not entirely, on drawing parallels from human capacities and needs that we have.
To those of central non-human animals who seem to have comparable, if not identical, needs,
the content of the small standing is inconceivable without us humans having experienced something that demands particular consideration of our needs,
and we grant the existence of those needs to sentence non-human animals that seem to have similar needs.
Them all standing, in other words, depends entirely on our experience of world that would be otherwise irrelevant.
We would have nothing to go by it. If you look at them, evaluate nothing at all.
But you think about it. Most of us are typically not at all concerned about the most tending of animals objects such as stones and rocks.
And I wonder whether that is not indicative of our failure to imagine anything that is not somehow somewhat like us and our experience of the world.
David Hume was right, of course, on moral feelings, as he put it, make up the essential and instinctive foundations of our morality.
But that's an issue I want to return to in just a moment.
Let's talk about what I think of the easy bits. When you think about cameras, for instance,
there's been some exciting reporting recently about the injection of reprogrammed human
derived stem cells from patients with Parkinson's disease into the brains of monkeys.
Concerns have been raised on the one hand, but the well, dissected ethics.
Sorry about the work dissected ethics of animal experimentation involving monkeys.
Invariably, if one is opposed to the creation and use of monkeys for research purposes, one would be opposed to such projects.
However, arguments also began evolving around the question of whether the insertion of human cells into these
monkeys brains should be seen as meaningfully impacting on the moral status of these non-human animals.
So if we had packed them all standing at, say, sixty seven or a hundred or five billion, however many trillion,
whatever you want to put it, but say we put that 67 out of 100 for the sake of the argument, 100 being,
of course,
a paradigmatic human person based on their being sentient beings with limited intellectual capacities within the insertion of those human cells,
move them higher up on the greasy pole of moral status. Would they be more human as a result of this, and so move up to more status pecking order?
Procurement cameras have also been produced with a view to creating organisms that can be utilised for organ transplantation purposes as before,
some of you opposed to the use of central non-humans as involuntary spare organ banks for human purposes.
And the question arises, of course,
at what point in time the human camera might be transformed into a human pig camera and whether eventually it might turn into a human,
depending on how far we might be able to advance such development projects.
What's what's with such changes impact meaningfully on the entities, small state standing or status, and bioethicists have worked their way, I think,
successfully through standard ethical objections to creating such chimaeras,
debating the supposed unnatural oddness of the procedures leading to chimaeras.
There were endless varieties of slippery slope arguments along Frankenstein scenarios,
concerns about violations of species integrity and if all else fails that bioethical all time classic free for all human dignity.
So it seems to me as if arguments about the moral status and moral standing of such chimaeras are not terribly complicated to settle.
Well, on positions developed in the context of the animal rights debate so applicable here,
and David in particular has nicely described the thing and analysed in his book Taking Animals Seriously the
relevant market events that we could look at and look up in this context from those reception consciousness,
pain, distress, fear, anxiety, suffering, pleasure, enjoyment, happiness, desires, concepts, beliefs and so on and so forth.
Now, while there's no consensus over the question of which of these market events is the relevant relevant one,
I'm talking like the weird accent at the moment. I apologise.
So while there is no consensus over the question of which of these macro events is the relevant one, what is it today,
or whether a single with a single one of these events constitutes a Trump type inflexion point from which everything changes?
The arguments are, well, familiar. Only two species is really the question of when cameras are sufficiently close to our
species that they should have full moral status cause some headaches to sentient.
It's like some look like when summer, for instance, that you have to University of Toronto.
That is an irrelevant consideration. Two defenders of a subject of a life standard like Tom Regan.
This would also be an irrelevance in any case. I think that with the exception of species whose stance I think is implausible,
there's little that can be said beyond the well-established arguments from the animal rights debates in this context.
People agree on criteria that can be defended even if we hold divergent views on which of these criteria we consider to be the right ones.
What these criteria have in common, however,
is that their starting point is some arguably physiological equivalency to a parrot to a paradigmatic human's capacities.
It doesn't matter, then, whether you settle for Bentham single sentient ism or Regan's more complex subject of a life criterion,
both standards are inconceivable without the human condition that gave rise to them.
The starting point was us, our ability to experience pain and suffer our disposition or capacity to be subjects of our lives and so on and so forth.
So, yeah, so this approach works well with regard to whatever kind of entity that possesses,
arguably the ability to experience experiences like paradigmatic humans to know the older folks amongst us might recall data.
Data is a fictional character in the science fiction series Star Trek.
Data is a highly sophisticated android with human like characteristics, including strangely having a sex data the machine.
But hopefully at least this data, I'm not so certain anymore, but hopefully uncontroversial data is male.
In various episodes of the series seems to regret its inability to experience emotions, including joy.
But regret, in fact, might be too strong a label. It's more like a serious befuddlement.
In the feature film Star Trek First Contact, if you have well, I hope you have seen it,
if not, just assume there was this movie called Star Trek First Contact. There's this evil ball queen, but some of you are smiling at the rest.
I'm lost. I lost you. Probably in any case. So, so in this feature film Star Trek first contact the evil box office data what he desires.
She reconfigures the Android so that he also experiences emotions as well as sensation skin crops are thrown in for good measure.
So this takes us, of course,
then to the challenging ethical question about the moral standing and status of potential future artificial intelligence entities created by us,
or potentially at some point created by themselves. That might display characteristics and behaviours similar to our own data, for instance,
has a line in one of the serious episodes where he says, and I quote, I quote data.
No kidding.
I chose to believe that I was a person and that I had the potential to become more than a collection of circuits and sub processors, unquote.
The right post in this episode is delivered by Beverly Crusher in brackets.
If you don't know how she discussed starships doctor and she says Commander Data,
the Android who sits yet ops operations dreams of being human, but he never gets the punchline to a joke, unquote.
So what? He failed as the upgraded data to relay to humans and so satisfy Rob Sparrow, about whom we will hear more in just a moment.
And so satisfy Sparrow, about whom in just a moment, everything changed in terms of his small status and more standing after that was done.
Once he had the emotion chip installed and the skin graft that permitted him to feel sensation.
He really was like us in more irrelevant, relevant weighs. What is it but relevant anyway?
His status arguably should have been picked somewhere above us due to his superior analytical skills and speed, as well as his bodily strength.
And that perhaps was the Star Trek writer's answer to the question of what constitutes consciousness.
Now, the troubling thing about post-war queen data is that we still had to take at face value his expressions of anxiety,
stress, fear and so on and so forth. But we didn't know, not in a serious and we really we could never know really how the skin grafts,
how the skin graft, emotion, shape and his Android hardware actually interacted.
Was that really the same as us experiencing anxiety, stress, fear and so on and so forth?
Thankfully, until today, there are no androids developed anywhere near to a level with a data like scenario would even occur as a serious question.
However, if we ever reached a stage where creatures like Cylons cybernetic life.
Lifeform notes silence could become a reality.
That is a debate the moral standing or status of bioengineered hybrids of humans and machines.
This empirical question would pose a very chilling, very serious challenges challenge to address indeed.
And the main reason for this is that we typically take expressions of pain, suffering and happiness at face value.
We can never know, ultimately, with a someone who expresses pain, suffering or happiness actually experiences any of those.
One of the first things that medical students are taught us to believe that patients when they claim that they are in pain.
This is so because despite a few gotcha strategies, we have no means to investigate the veracity of such patients claims.
We act on our own experience of those feelings and assume that someone who is physiologically close to us can experience the same so existing,
I think the analysis then unless they are specious and I would put it to you that there's still a species,
even if you attention to them, because there's nothing else. If we do that, we can do probably rely on the truth of those assumptions.
So I think it's not too far fetched, then,
to grant the truth of such assumptions with regard to being set on vital respects like us as biological cameras could arguably be.
But where would that leave data Android's human hybrids? And my response to this?
Would be that we would need to do to research empirical questions of whether data claims,
whether what data claims he feels is something that he actually feels in a manner that is similar to us,
at least we have something we could compare under those circumstances.
If the answer to the question then is yes, we can deploy our established modes of ethical analysis to address questions of moral status standing.
But perhaps more importantly, questions of our moral obligations.
So I'm very grateful to Ruth and Tom for working this out for us doing the grand project because I'm genuinely curious in brackets.
I don't know whether it's possible actually to get these answers at all, but you know.
Well, let's assume the answer is no. Or quite possibly, maybe. Where would that leave us?
And here's what I think of the the more difficult bits, self-learning artificial intelligence machines like androids, for instance,
there's quite a bit of literature that exists on the ethical implications of
creating and eventually interacting with self-learning artificial intelligence.
And let me not in passing at least,
that I'm somewhat less excited about the challenges these machines cause in terms of their moral status and standing,
even though these questions are fascinating.
I'm much more anxious as a science fiction fan and with with reference to Terminator, Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek, certainly,
I'm much more concerned about the question of whether they will eventually consider us humanoids as imperfect to be eradicated carbon based lifeforms,
as Voyager pointed out.
And it's a prop in Star Trek or having us having moral status and as deserving to survive when machines eventually will take over.
Now, you might recall that the Cylons, both in the 2003 mini series as well as the 2004 Battlestar Galactica movie, were sort of a sinful and flawed.
And to be eradicated. Now, these are religiously fanatic machines, but there was still crazy.
In any case, the question of moral status and moral standing seems quite significantly more difficult vis a vis self-learning,
artificially intelligent machines such as, for instance, androids like the pre upgrade data who didn't have the emotional chip.
So for the purpose of this, I would henceforth refer to androids, but please interpret this as any kind of self-learning artificial intelligence
machine that does not have the uncontroversial physiologic capacity to feel pain.
It doesn't have it because unlike post upgrade data and unlike the humanoid Cylons,
there is no biological component that could give rise to the kind of pain and
suffering as we understand it when we consider how mammals or equivalent lifeforms.
So what would be the situation because of intelligence, a similar event of personhood?
Rob Sparrow Some of you might be familiar with his work.
His book admonished Citizen here, OK? He has argued years ago, when I didn't even think about any of these issues,
he has argued for Turing trials type tests to assist us in determining whether an artificial intelligence possesses moral standing.
Now, as we have said, I think Walter did it. The original Turing test, of course, had a different function here.
The objective was simply to test with an Android could manage to talk in such a way that a human unaware
that they were talking to the Android could be fooled into thinking that they were talking to it,
that they were talking or conversing with a fellow adult human.
Turing was in no doubt in his days already that machines eventually would be able to succeed on that
frontier and indeed an artificial intelligence machine reportedly successfully prosecuting tests in 2014.
No, Spiros, cybersecurity security trial type test is somewhat different that he proposes you propose instead,
and I quote a test for when computers have a chief moral standing by asking when a computer might take the place of a human being in a moral dilemma,
such as a trial situation in which a choice must be made as to which of two human lives to save.
We will know, he says, that machines have achieved moral standing comparable to a human when the replacement of one
of these people with an artificial intelligence leaves the character of the dilemma intact,
unquote. And Sparrow has little doubt. If we decide that more personhood is only a matter of cognitive skills,
it's just a matter of time until artificial intelligence attains moral standing.
I think he's right there. Spare us spare and instead is defending an account of moral standing, where for a machine to pass a Turing test.
It must be capable of being the object of iMore's grief and sympathy,
a small emotion such as these are partially constitutive of our concept of a person, he says.
Then he goes on, but I claim machines are not appropriate surprises Robespierre, after all.
But I claim machines are not appropriate objects of these responses because they incapable of achieving the individual personality too much,
which they are oriented unquote.
So it seems to me that that mould standing for Spiro and targets crucially being part of a network of others like like us,
with whom we socially interact like, for instance, in the African philosophy of Ubuntu and machines is right up to a point.
Today, any case would have some difficulty passing such a test. He eventually admits that his analysis points down to something more trivial.
It goes back to our intuitions about what such machines can and can't do,
as opposed to what what they might at a certain point in time the de facto can't or can do.
He writes. We cannot seriously hold. The machines have thoughts of feeling in a life because a radical.
Inevitably arises as to whether they really feel what they appear to.
And that's the crux of it. Will never know. Probably, and could not.
A card would have offered similar thoughtful thoughts vis-a-vis non-human higher mammals.
In his days, Descartes was clearly wrong. The jury's out there on Sparrow.
Time will tell. If I had to place a bet, I would bet that Sparrow would eventually be proven wrong to.
I'm sceptical that special social relationship strategy is helpful.
It encounters problems of the same kind that we are familiar with from the animal rights debates.
There will be humans who are unable or unwilling to reciprocate socially in social relationships or to participate in such relationships.
Surely, their moral standing and old status cannot be contingent on their recognition by others.
Why should someone small standing depend on whether they succeed in becoming the object of our remorse, grief or sympathy or sympathy?
If we have learnt anything from the court's failure to recognise animal pain and animal suffering,
it's this we are as a species, not sophisticated enough to do justice,
even to others who are in fact uncontroversial like us in morally rather than face ways, let alone to others who are very much unlike us.
So leaving aside relational approaches to mould status or moral standing,
it seems to me that two questions arise, one of which seems to be empirical in nature.
The other one in normative in nature will give answers to both of these questions.
I think both of my answers are pretty crappy, and I'm kind of curious whether you have better answers.
So the empirical question is this with androids express the experience of pain and suffering happiness and misery.
What what they actually experience, if anything.
Is it comparable to to what we would experience, is it comparable to what, say, higher non-human mammals might experience?
In case you are able to defend an affirmative answer to these questions,
you would be able to deploy the same type of analysis that we have been going over and over again since yesterday here.
And so we would be able actually to to to make sense of this in terms of ethical analysis and in some sense,
this would be good news given that it's well-trodden territory. He would be able to bring to bear a sophisticated ethical frameworks to this question.
And as alluded to this already in the in the section on chimaeras, the trouble is, of course, we can't.
You do not have the means to make a definite determination and spare us answers quite revealing again in the end, like us.
Therefore, it ain't happening. He might be right today. He might be wrong tomorrow.
And this takes me to the other question. I think it's crucial and it's normative.
What if the empirical question is answered in the negative, like it's not like us?
We have no evidence that there is real pain. We have no evidence that there is we are suffering.
We have no evidence that there's real regret, no matter what they tell us.
Would that give us more licence to discard than Android's expression of suffering?
And we should finally address the elephant in the room, is it normatively defensible to reduce answers to the question about moral status and
more standing to essentially criteria that look exclusively at the human experience?
And it's good everything that falls outside the realm of for moral consideration, as we are doing so far.
And that's pretty much a Spurs response. But the same was true, of course, percentage isn't based approaches and it falls short.
I think of what the Somalia requires. It doesn't take us long to realise that our current strategy to make us the
standard of value if you evaluating anything else is difficult to defend and.
Bear with me, if I come up one more time with a science fiction example.
So imagine there's an extraterrestrial species visiting us, it's not completely out of the possibility it might happen at some point.
So they visit us, leaving that spaceship to make particular requests vis-a-vis their accommodation.
They request a particular low temperature and they require a large and as energy source to regenerate during and after our meetings.
As hosts, we are provided by them with the necessary specifications for the hardware.
They also kind of eventually provide us with some hot because our adaptors apparently are incompatible.
Eventually they leave their spaceship. Well, the materials in our meeting room bring you long down energy source to ensure they have sufficient
regeneration capability until their bodies and our energy sources have to be made compatible.
Our service androids provide the human species representative for subsequent systems doing the meeting.
This quickly an exchange of information occurring between the extraterrestrials and our service androids.
The extraterrestrials, much like European politicians, would do in business meetings with Chinese counterparts,
bring up the issue of Android rights and based on what they gathered from our androids,
what they perceived to be abuse and discriminatory conduct by humans towards those
machines because we have made already our determination that none of that counts.
Essentially, their charge is extraterrestrials that we had ignored unfairly the androids demands for reliable energy supply,
the appropriate temperature and worse time repairs both in their work and the out-of-service environment.
So it is true that androids did complain about these three issues and about the temperature in particular to us,
but we were very quick to reject those complaints on the grounds that androids cannot suffer as far as they were.
As far as we or they were concerned, the androids were faking it and the at sparrows were quite approvingly, apparently.
It was also cheaper to do so. And in this future, society capitalism still reigns.
So the extraterrestrials wouldn't accept any of these explanations. They can't experience pain or suffering or happiness.
They bring up the example of cheap labour that they have imparted to their homeworld.
These biological organisms are in fact not dissimilar to us in that they require sustenance, rest the ascension, but our definition of sentience.
And while the extraterrestrials can't experience any of these things,
they did listen to the complaints that they received when the first cohort of workers got weaker and weaker due to the lack of available food.
They realised quickly that their standards of well-being are quite different to that of those labourers.
And they realised that they could not apply their own standards of well-being to them. Their needs were different.
No, I grant you, of course, that this is all completely made up as far fetched as far as hypotheticals go.
But I do think that it goes to show maybe that our strategy to using our own experience that we are
familiar with as the gold and the only standard might be impossible to defend when it's challenged.
Different beings would have different needs, so as far as they're more standing on what status is concerned, any attempt at making a determination.
Should be unique and different to vet. That we deployed in the case of non-human animals,
insofar as there doesn't have to be biological material directly involved in the production of artificial intelligence machines.
And yet the show disposition capacities that seem comparable,
if not identical to some human disposition capacities that typically give rise to claims about mould status and moral standing.
So part of the difficulty we face will undoubtedly be to answer the question of whether hypothetical human ascension being like responses
to a particular stimuli in an artificial intelligence entity are morally equivalent to the responses given by beings that we know well,
that we know that we think we know are physiologically capable of having such experiences and if they are not.
Well, that was, give us more licence to ignore them. So let me wrap this up by talking briefly about the secret lives of stones.
An obvious response to to my hypothetical is that there are no such extraterrestrials.
There's no evidence that there are beings who can be wrong too or not at a minimum, sentient.
It's all nice and well to go on, harping about the ball screen and data or silence when they also do not exist.
And I concede that I'm not proposing that we grant rights to particular operating environments or treatments to current androids.
But that is only because they have not yet reached the stage of sophistication when that seems warranted in a way they are like, Stone said.
We kicked down the road like milkshakes plotted. Protesters shared with another.
For us, the reason why we do not grant rocks and stones, particular a particular right to be left alone that is lying forever.
Where they are is perhaps not only because they have no interest that we can wrap our heads around for the reasons that I mentioned,
but also because they have never made any effort to communicate their violated or threatened interests.
So to be fair to those who think that I'm too conservative, that we should go further,
there are in fact precedents supporting supportive of their stance already in our legal systems.
To give you an example, we create legal rights today not only to persons and also persons like corporations,
for instance, but also include things like reverse.
For instance, some of you will be familiar with the Wanganui River in New Zealand, which has been granted the same rights as persons.
It must be treated by law as a living entity,
even though clearly it is not going to say clearly it is not based on what we know and who might be mistaken.
The reason for this is that the Maori hold a worldview where the river is considered a living entity with valid moral claims and valid moral standing,
and ultimately the political campaign succeeded. This is what happened.
No, I think of rivers as ecosystems with instrumental value that should give rise to certain protections.
But unless one subscribes to world view that William Franklin has described as a holistic environmental ethic where everything somehow counts,
it would not be because it deserves those protections in its own right. That is in the absence of it being of instrumental value.
Interestingly enough, this holistic ethic fits to address our standard lifeboat example, and you can just think about it.
Say if in this example, where basically everything in the in the environment somehow matters has some standing
say you have five million cancer cells in one person with cancer who matters more,
how do you quantify that? There's nothing at all in this. I think that that would answer this question.
But what about the future? What about future post upgrade data equivalent androids?
My view would be this unlike Spiro,
I would not want to eliminate such a possibility of vested interests that are specific to future sophisticated androids,
but accountant visitors beyond hypotheticals that have currently at least no relation whatsoever to reality.
Far fetched as the hypothetical with the visiting extraterrestrial was, it points us to something that might be relevant,
though if there is a sophisticated Android, say, a machine with no biologic components at all, that feels wrong but wrong our treatment of it.
You will need some evidence or argument from it or from a proxy. Defending it that shows evidence in support of the violated interest or harm claims.
It's easier, I think, for us to investigate claims of harm if there's a biological being that is somewhat familiar to us.
It's harder, if not impossible, for us to investigate such claims.
If there's no biological component that offers us a chance to compare like with like and draw conclusions from that.
So I think it's not unreasonable to place the onus on something that claims rights for itself and the claimant or the human proxy,
as has been the case with non-human animals or the river in New Zealand.
In our history, at least, rights activism ultimately led to resolve societal change, whether it was for people who were held as slaves,
women, queer people or animals, they met their case or we made their case, depending on how you want to read this.
We made our case sometimes by deploying militant means, and we succeeded. At a minimum, I would expect androids to make their case.
To stake their claim. No one could object that androids might not have the capacity to do so themselves.
And again, I think the case of the Wanganui River is illuminating the case that was brought by the Maori people acting on the river's behalf.
So one could easily imagine human proxies representing the androids to.
So the Animal Liberation, the Android Liberation Front, or something like that.
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that if something that might have justifiable
moral claims against mall agents is unable to communicate those claims,
and these claims are so significantly different to what we know today that we can't imagine them.
We are not quite blameworthy for not recognising our failings. And this seems a reasonable response, maybe not to me,
it looks like a reasonable response to the conundrum of wanting to do justice to something that might be,
but that we haven't seen yet, and that would be very different to us.
It's also easier than to conjure up justifications for interests that would be significantly different to our own and that it's not impossible,
in fact, to conceptualise such claims today. In the meantime, what I think is worth reconsidering, you know what,
I think it's worth reconsidering some of the sentiment isn't a person, not a variations of them really should be the only games in town.
And I have no answer. By the way, it's not a rhetorical question I would not be able to say yes or no, I'm just uncertain at this stage.
It's all science fiction does give a surprisingly rich fodder for analysis, and it might prepare us for things to come.
So thanks very much for your time.