Affirmative Action for Androids

Jimmy Alfonso Licon asks, when should we prioritise android rights?

- Jimmy Alfonso Licon

We should begin examining the question of whether there should be affirmative action for androids by first answering a couple of prior questions. Would androids count morally anyway? And what conditions, if any, would justify affirmative action for androids?

It’s easy to dismiss the possibility that androids, being machines, would deserve any greater moral consideration than a cellphone; but in any future world where androids have become self-aware, capable of suffering, and have projects and values which matter to them, to not give them moral rights would mean that the androids would be second-class citizens at best, and slaves at worst. Such an arrangement wouldn’t survive: many humans would feel bad for the androids, and the androids would resist.

So what are we to think morally about androids?

Do Androids Count Morally?

For something to qualify as the subject of fairness considerations, it must first have moral standing. As the philosopher Christopher Morris explains:

“[The] metaphor of the moral community is an interesting one. It makes possession of moral standing analogous to the political status of citizenship. Like membership in the political community, membership in ‘the moral community’ gives one a particular status that non-members lack, in particular a set of rights. [Something] has moral standing if it is owed duties. This understanding of moral standing connects it with the notion of legal standing; both are conceptions of a status that entitles the holder to something.”

(The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, edited by Tom Beauchamp and R.G. Frey, p.262, 2011)

To put the point simply: to have moral standing is to deserve moral consideration for one’s own sake.