If you could build the perfect robot which could reason and have emotions like a human, should it have the same rights as a human?

N92 wrote:
Hi,
I am writing an essay on "If you could build the perfect robot which
could reason and have emotions like a human, should it have the same
rights as a human?" for Philosophy at school, and I have to collect
opinions, so any opinions anyone has on this would be greatly
appreciated.

Star Trek: The Next Generation
"The Measure of Man"

http://tinyurl.com/zuytd

Episode #35; Scene #15

[THE HEARING HAS BEEN RECONVENED AFTER A RECESS.]

PICARD: Commander Riker has dramatically demonstrated to this court
that Commander Data is a machine. Do we deny that? No. Because it is
not relevant. We too are machines, just machines of a different type.
Commander Riker has also reminded us that Lieutenant Commander Data was
created by a human, do we deny that? Again it is not relevant. Children
are created from the building blocks of their parents' DNA. Are they
property? I call Lieutenant Commander Data to the stand. What are
these? [holding a box of medals]

DATA: My medals.

PICARD: Why do you pack them? What logical purpose do they serve?

DATA: I do not know sir, I suppose none. I just wanted them. Is that
vanity?

PICARD: And this? [Picard holds a book]

DATA: A gift from you.

PICARD: Do you value it?

DATA: Yes.

PICARD: Why?

DATA: It is a reminder of friendship and service.

PICARD: And this? (Picard turns on the holographic image of a female
officer). You have no other portraits of your fellow crew members. Why
this?

DATA: I'd prefer not to answer that question, sir. I gave my word.

PICARD: Under the circumstances, Data, I don't think Tasha would mind.

DATA: She was special to me. We were intimate.

PICARD: Thank you, Commander. I have no more questions for this
witness. I call to the stand Commander Maddox as a hostile witness.
Commander Maddox, is your contention that Commander Data is not a
sentient being and therefore not entitled to all the rights reserved
for all life-forms within this Federation?

MADDOX: Data is not sentient, no.

PICARD: Could you enlighten us? What is required for sentience?

MADDOX: Intelligence, self-awareness, consciousness.

PICARD: Prove to the court that I am sentient.

MADDOX: This is absurd. We all know that you are sentient.

PICARD: So I am sentient but Commander Data is not? Why? Why am I
sentient?

MADDOX: Well, you are self-aware.

PICARD: Ah, that's the second of your criteria. Let's deal with the
first: intelligence. Is Commander Data intelligent?

MADDOX: Yes, it has the ability to learn and understand and to cope
with new situations.

PICARD: Like this hearing.

MADDOX: Yes.

PICARD: What about self-awareness? What does that mean? Why am I
self-aware?

MADDOX: Because you are conscious of your existence and actions. You
are aware of your self and your own ego.

PICARD: Commander Data. What are you doing now?

DATA: I am taking part in a legal hearing to determine my rights and
status. Am I a person or am I property?

PICARD: And what is at stake?

DATA: My right to choose. Perhaps my very life.

PICARD: "My rights" . . "my status" . . "my right to choose" . . "my
life". Seems reasonably self-aware to me. . . .Commander . . I'm
waiting.

MADDOX: This is exceedingly difficult.

PICARD: Do you like Commander Data?

MADDOX: I don't know it well enough to like or dislike it.

PICARD: But you do admire him?

MADDOX: Oh, yes it is an extraordinary piece of . .

PICARD: . . of engineering and programming, yes you have said that. You
have dedicated your life to the study of cybernetics in general and
Data in particular.

MADDOX: Yes.

PICARD: And now you intend to dismantle him.

MADDOX: So I can learn to construct more.

PICARD: How many more.

MADDOX: As many as are needed. Hundreds, thousands if necessary. There
is no
limit.

PICARD: A single Data, and forgive me Commander, is a curiosity, a
wonder even. But thousands of Datas isn't that becoming a race. And
won't we be judged by how we treat that race? Now tell me Commander,
what is Data?

MADDOX: I don't understand

PICARD: What is he?

MADDOX: A machine.

PICARD: Are you sure

MADDOX: Yes.

PICARD: You see he has met two of your three criteria for sentience.
What if he meets the third, consciousness, in even the slightest
degree? What is he then? I don't know. Do you? Do YOU [turning to the
judge]? Well that's the question you have to answer. Your Honor, the
courtroom is a crucible. In it we burn away irrelevancies until we are
left with a pure product, the truth, for all time. Now sooner or later
this man (MADDOX) or others like him will succeed in replicating
Commander Data. Your ruling today will determine how we will regard
this creation of our genius. It will reveal the kind of people we are,
what he is destined to be. It will reach far beyond this courtroom and
this one android. It could significantly redefine the boundaries of
personal liberty. Expanding them for some, savagely curtailing them for
others.

Are you prepared to condemn him, and all those who come after him, to
servitude and slavery? Your honor, Starfleet was founded to seek out
new life -- well there it sits. Waiting. You wanted a chance to make
law. Well here's your chance, make it a good one.

LAVOIR: It sits there looking at me but I don't know what it is. This
case has dealt with questions best left to saints and philosophers. I
am neither competent or qualified to answer that. I've got to make a
ruling, to try to speak to the future. Is Data a machine? Is he the
property of Starfleet? No. We've all been dancing around the main
question: Does Data have a soul? I don't know that he has. I don't know
that I have. But I have to give him the freedom to explore that
question himself. It is the ruling of this court that Lieutenant
Commander Data has the freedom to choose.

END SCENE

Episode #35; Scene #15
http://tinyurl.com/zuytd

#####################################

)- You say that "All rights are
)- to be balanced for the "Highest
)- Good of All". Who decides what
)- the "Highest Good" is?

A *procedure* which has been agreed upon and provides some possible
risks for all contractees.

Imagine what would happen, for example, if during a crucial break in a
basketball game, each player debated with every other player what the
team should do next.

....the distinction between (a) adoption of a decision procedure being
in everyone's interest and (b) the actual decisions resulting from its
application being in everyone's interest. Where a holds, it may be
rational to consent to the procedure in spite of the fact that its
application may not work to everyone's benefit.

Imagine, for example, two children, who constantly quarrel over who is
to make the first move in a board game. Rather than constantly fight,
it may be rational for them to agree to a rule determining who goes
first. Perhaps the rule is, "Each participant shall roll a die and the
one with the highest number on the face of the die shall move first. In
case of ties, the procedure is to be repeated until a winner emerges."
On any given occasion, one child will lose if the rule is followed.
Nevertheless, it may be rational for them both to adopt the rule and
avoid interminable quarrels. Accordingly, premise 2's identification of
an autonomous decision with one that never leads to the subordination
of interests confuses the rationale for consenting to a decision
procedure with that for evaluating the outcome of individual decisions.
As in the case of the children, it may be rational to allow for some
subordination of interests in the application of a procedure when it is
significantly in everyone's interest to adopt such a procedure in the
first place.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The doctrine of natural rights evolved over a long period of time and
was often the center of political and philosophical controversy. The
roots of the doctrine go back at least as far as debates among the
Sophists of ancient Greece over whether justice is conventional or
subject to objective warrant.

Plato and Aristotle argued that the nature of justice could be
discovered by reason and so was accessible to all rational persons. And
the later Stoic philosophers emphasized a natural law, binding on all
men, that takes precedence over the particular laws embodied in human
political institutions.

As natural laws were held by the Stoics to be independent of existing
legal principles, they constituted an Archimedean point from which the
legal order could be evaluated.

The concern for the rule of law as manifested in ancient Rome led to
further emphasis on the Stoic ideal of a law of nature. In A.D. 534
Emperor Justinian presided over the completion of the Corpus Iuris
Civilis, a great codebook of Roman Law. This codification of the law of
the Roman Empire was to have remarkable influence, for one of the great
gifts of Rome to later civilizations was appreciation of the
significance of the rule of law. Justinian's law books claimed
universal validity, and so reinforced the Stoic ideal of a law over and
above the law of any particular community, applying equally to all.
This conception of a "higher" law than that of one's community was
acknowledged by many educated Romans during various stages of the
Empire's development. Perhaps none expressed the idea as well as Cicero
who declared:

"There is indeed a law, right reason, which is in accordance with
nature; existing in all, unchangeable, eternal. ... It is not one thing
at Rome, and another thing at Athens . . . but it is a law, eternal and
immutable for all nations and for all time."

This conception of natural law was further developed by Scholastic
philosophers during the Middle Ages. The account defended by Thomas
Aquinas has been especially influential. It fitted the Stoic belief in
a rational moral order, analogous to an (allegedly) rational natural
order, into the framework of Judeo-Christian theology, which sometimes
identified moral laws with commands of God. This was done by
identifying the natural laws with outpourings of divine reason which,
being rational, were open to discovery by other rational beings.
Aquinas maintained that:

"it is clear that the whole community of the universe is governed by
divine reason. This rational guidance of created things on the part of
God...we can call the Eternal Law...But of all others, rational
creatures are subject to the divine Providence in a special way ... in
that they control their own actions...This participation in the Eternal
Law by rational creatures is called the Natural Law."

Aquinas emphasized that this natural law is a higher law than that of
such man-made institutions as the state:

And if a human law is at variance in any particular way with Natural
Law, it is no longer legal but rather is a corruption of law.

###############################################

This conception of natural law, like that of the Stoics, provides an
external, rational standard against which the laws and policies of
particular states are to be measured.

###############################################

The Scholastic conception of natural law, however, was intimately tied
to a theological foundation and tended to be embedded in a theistic
political framework. Although natural laws were held to be discernible
by reason, they were also held to be promulgated by divine will. The
political order, in turn, was held to serve a function determined by
that will; namely, the development of distinctively human nature within
a given social framework. However, in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, growing rationalism and growing individualism led to
revision of the classical account of natural law and natural right.
Such documents as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
American Declaration of Independence asserted the rights of humans qua
humans against the state. The foundation of natural law and of the
rights of the individual was placed in reason alone, rather than in
theology. The political order, in turn, was viewed as an instrument
through which diverse and essentially egoistic individuals could pursue
their private ends and not as an agency for socialization through which
the citizen would become fully human. Natural rights were appealed to
in defense of human liberty and autonomy against what came to be
perceived as the potentially (and often actually) oppressive power of
the state.

However, with the rise of utilitarianism in the nineteenth century, the
natural-rights approach entered into a long eclipse. Utilitarians, with
their forward-looking consequentialist ethical theory, regarded only
the effects of action or policy as relevant to moral evaluation. Right
and wrong were held to depend on consequences, not on allegedly
pre-existing natural rights. Thus, Jeremy Bentham helped to relegate
the doctrine of natural rights to the graveyard of abandoned
philosophies when he held that "Natural rights is simple nonsense:
natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense-nonsense upon
stilts." Until recently, the doctrine of natural rights remained where
the utilitarians had cast it.

But, as we have seen, a basic problem for utilitarian ethics is how to
avoid permitting the oppression of a minority so long as the result is
the production of the greatest overall good. The horrors of the Nazi
Holocaust and the struggle for the civil rights of black persons in
America seem to have motivated many to search for a normative political
theory that asserts the inviolability of the individual. While
utilitarianism, on any plausible interpretation, would condemn Nazi
genocide, many reflective people have regarded the kind of protection
utilitarianism provides for the individual as inadequate, resting at
best on complex empirical calculations, and have tried to argue for the
inviolability of persons on nonutilitarian grounds. Thus, the doctrine
of natural rights has resurfaced, shorn of much of its excess
metaphysical and theological baggage, in the form of a plea for human
dignity and for the kind of treatment that makes at least a minimally
decent human life possible.

############################################

How then are we to conceive of natural rights?

Traditionally, natural rights and natural law have been thought of as
independent of any given social or political order. Thus, they can
serve as external standards for the evaluation of such institutional
frameworks. This explains the point of calling a certain class of
rights natural ones.

"Natural" has many opposites, including "artificial," "social,"
"conventional," "abnormal." In the context of natural rights, "natural"
is in contrast with "social" and "conventional." Natural rights do not
arise from any particular organization of society or from any roles
their bearers may play within social institutions. They are to be
distinguished from the rights of parents against children, teachers
against students, and clients against their lawyers. Instead, they are
rights possessed on grounds other than the institutional role of the
holders or the nature of the society to which they belong. Conversely,
natural rights impose obligations on anyone, regardless of rank or
position. Since such rights are not held in virtue of social status,
everyone is obliged to respect them.

Natural rights also are thought of as morally fundamental. That is, the
justification of other rights claims ultimately involves appeal to
them. They are the most general of our moral rights. Thus, the right to
pursue a hobby in one's spare time can be defended as deriving from a
more basic natural right to liberty from interference by others.

Moreover, natural rights are general rights, not special rights.
Someone, for example, may have the right to limit your freedom because
of some special arrangement to which you and he previously had agreed.
Thus, if you promised Reed to carry his packages home, then he has the
right to have you do your duty, even though you would rather do
something else at the time. Such a right is a special right; one "which
arises out of special transactions between individuals or out of some
special relationship in which they stand to each other...," General
rights, however, are rights that hold independent of the existence of
such special arrangements. H.L.A. Hart has argued that special rights
presuppose general ones. For if one needs a special right in order to
be justified in limiting another's freedom, then in the absence of such
a special ground, others have the general right not to be interfered
with. If Professor Hart is right here, we have at least part of the
reason why natural rights are morally fundamental.

Natural rights are general rights, then, in that their existence is not
dependent upon special relationships or previous agreements that rights
bearers may have entered into. Natural rights are not only logically
prior to social and political institutions, they are prior to human
agreements as well.

In addition, many writers, including the authors of the Declaration of
Independence, have held that such rights are (-INALIENABLE-). If this
claim is taken to mean that it is always wrong to fail to honor a claim
of natural right, the claim is mistaken. Since rights claims can clash,
situations may arise in which we can honor the natural rights of some
only at the expense of failing to honor the natural rights of others.
Although this is lamentable, it hardly can be wrong if some such rights
are not honored in this sort of context. No other alternative is
available. (Perhaps, however, there is one right that is inalienable in
this strong sense; namely, the metaright to have one's other rights
counted in the moral decision-making process.)

More plausible interpretations of the claim that natural rights are
inalienable are available. Perhaps they are inalienable in the sense
that they must always be counted fully from the moral point of view,
unless waived by the rights bearer under special sorts of
circumstances. Thus, if there is a natural right to life, perhaps it
cannot legitimately be disregarded unless the rights bearer himself
decides that life is no longer worth living. Or perhaps natural rights
are inalienable in the sense that rights bearers themselves cannot
waive their claims of natural right. Thus, if someone were to say, "I
give up my right to life, so go ahead and kill me," this would not
entitle anyone to kill the speaker. However, requests for beneficient
euthanasia in order to avoid the suffering of a terminal illness may
constitute counterexamples to this formulation. Many of us are inclined
to accept a waiver of the right to life in such circumstances. Perhaps,
most plausibly, natural rights are inalienable in the sense that they
cannot be waived except by the bearer and then only to protect another
right of the same fundamental order. Thus, in the case of a request for
beneficient euthanasia, we may view the patient as waiving the right to
life in order to better implement the right to be free of purposeless
suffering.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Someone has a natural right to something, then, if and only if (a) he
or she is entitled to it; (b) the entitlement is morally fundamental;
(c) it does not arise from the bearer's social status, the
prescriptions of a legal system, or from any institutional rules or
practices; and (d) it is general in the sense discussed above. In
addition, natural rights may be inalienable in one of the several
plausible senses mentioned. Condition a places natural rights within
the broad category of rights while the other conditions identify
natural rights as moral rights of a distinctive and fundamental kind.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Individual and the Political Order, Third Edition
by Norman E. Bowie, Robert L. Simon
http://tinyurl.com/kexb

[scanned from 2nd edition]

http://www.bartleby.com/65/na/natrlrig.html
http://ethics.acusd.edu/index.html
http://www.hrweb.org/history.html
http://tinyurl.com/keya