Dead Stuff

Importantly, the Japanese reception of robots in general is comparatively untinged by such dark concerns. This may reflect a very different Japanese tradition of animism. As readers familiar with animé and related Japanese traditions will recognize, contra a Western dualism that believes living minds (and souls) are radically separate from matter as “dead stuff,” animistic traditions assert that all “things” about us are alive in some way. And so the dualistic gap between life and matter (and potential dangers such a gap may pose) is replaced by a continuum between more material robots and more fully animate human beings. In both Japan and Western countries and cultures, nonetheless, sexbots are clearly designed and marketed to be perfectly compliant to their owner’s wishes. A primary ethical issue emerges here – not only in their consumption and uses, but in their very design: insofar as sexbots are overwhelmingly female, they thereby inscribe and reinforce traditional attitudes of male dominance and female subordination. It hardly needs saying that such attitudes remain in full, often brutal, force in countries and cultures throughout the world – including the Scandinavian countries, however much they otherwise stand out as the most gender-equal societies in the industrialized world. When sexbots were still the stuff of science fiction, UK computer scientist David Levy inaugurated contemporary ethical debates on sex and robots with his Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human–Robot Relationships. We will see that Levy’s arguments are very largely utilitarian. Some of the strongest counterarguments to Levy’s great enthusiasm for sexbots have been forcefully developed by Kathleen Richardson: Richardson argues much more from deontological and virtue ethics perspectives, in hopes of stopping the production of sexbots altogether. Between these two poles are middle grounds hat e will then explore.