Can a Robot Be a Person? De-Facing Personhood and Finding It Again with Lévinas

Abstract

The question “Can a robot be a person?” has emerged of late in the field of bioethics. The paper addresses the question in dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas. It begins with something like an archeological reconstruction of personhood in modernity, in order to locate the context out of which the question posed, “can a robot be a person?” might take on meaning. Descartes, Hume and Kant are the most important exponents of the story, their position emerging in direct contradiction with the classical metaphysics of the person, such as one finds in Thomas Aquinas. Levinas rejects the rationalist perspective of a bodiless mind, a person reduced to her cognitive capacities, no less than the empirical version of a mindless body, both understandings of personhood being de facto prevalent in contemporary bioethics, especially in the Anglo-American version of it. On the other hand, as Levinas suggests, to be a person is to be “manifested in the exteriority of the face, which is not the disclosure of an impersonal Neuter. If so, a robot cannot be a person. The paper tries to show why this is the case.