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Notes

[1] This modern innovation is also significant because it marked an important departure from medieval practices whereby animals were thought to be capable of committing crimes against human beings and put on trial for their transgressions. For more on this subject, see Beirnes (1994), Chesterman (2021), Evans (1906), and Kadri (2007).

[2] The decision to focus on reason as a qualifying criterion for inclusion in the community of moral subjects already hints at a potential problem and prejudicial exclusion. It is human beings—those entities who have defined themselves as animal rationale—who have decided that rationality (e.g., their own defining feature) is the exclusive qualifying characteristic. Human beings, therefore, grant to themselves the power and the privilege to be both the measure and measurer in matters concerning moral status. For more on this problem and its consequences, see Gunkel (2012).

[3] For a more detailed investigation of points of intersection and divergence between the “animal question” and the “machine question,” see Gellers (2021), Gunkel (2012), and Hogan (2017).

[4] One might ask (as was the case with one of the reviewers of this essay): Why is the exclusion of nothing ethically problematic? It is a very reasonable question and one that appears to exonerate IE insofar as it could be said that this moral system is so complete in its efforts at inclusivity that it excludes nothing. Although an accurate statement, this is not what is of principal importance. What is important is that IE, like all other moral philosophies, still cannot do without or escape from its symptom (e.g., the necessary and systemic exclusions that are its condition of possibility). Because IE aims to be absolutely totalizing and inclusive of all being what remains excluded can only be nothing. This “nothing,” however, is not no-thing. It is the symptom of IE. For a more complete analysis, see Gunkel (2012).

[5] This shift in focus has instituted what Coeckelbergh (2012) has called a relational turn in ethics. Other formulations of a relational approach to moral status ascription can be found in Abate (2019), Fox (1995), and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2017).

[6] Following this, we can say that the goal of justice is not and cannot be organized around efforts to develop a more inclusive (or totalizing) ethics by eliminating (or pretending to have eliminated) all that would have been excluded. Ethics is and cannot do without its symptom. The question is not whether there is an exclusive remainder or not. Instead, what matters is how a particular formulation of ethics responds to and takes responsibility for its own necessary and unavoidable systemic exclusions. This is the task not of ethics per se but of what Derrida (1978, p. 111) called “the ethics of ethics.”

[7] My own vision of ethics following from this line of reasoning has been developed and presented in the books The Machine Question (Gunkel, 2012), Robot Rights (Gunkel, 2018), and How to Survive a Robot Invasion (Gunkel, 2020).

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