Abootaleb Safdari

Ethics and Information Technology 25 (2023):  53, s10676-023-09731-9

doi: 10.1007/s10676-023-09731-9

David Gunkel’s most recent book Person, Thing, Robot: A Moral and Legal Ontology for the 21st Century and Beyond is an impressive intellectual project, which intends to get back to the Things themselves. The Thing with capital T, to which Gunkel intends to get back to is not thing in the current sense of its use which is typically understood in contrast to the person. It is, he (2023, pp. 166–167) writes “…a monstrous excrescence that escapes the conceptual grasp of existing categories.” The most visible manifestation of this conceptual monster that is neither a person nor a thing is the robot. Therefore, in order to understand the status of robots as Things, we must go beyond the deeply rooted and well-established thing/person distinction. This, in turn, brings us to the heart of his project: deconstruction. Going beyond this distinction necessitates deconstructing the existing conceptual order in which “thing” is embedded. Gunkel implements the deconstruction procedure in two steps, one negative and one more positive. First, in the negative phase of his project, he convincingly demonstrates the lack of any compelling rationale for categorizing a robot as a ‘thing,‘ a ‘person,‘ or even a hybrid of both, through an extensive examination of the literature. This paves the way for his positive step, in which he attempts to open up a new horizon, a new conceptual order to understand robots. In this part, his reliance on Levinas’ philosophy is especially noticeable.

©The Author(s) 2023