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The Symptom of Ethics - Rethinking Ethics in the Face of the Machine

Human-Machine Communication

Volume 4, 2022,
https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.4.4

David J. Gunkel¹

¹ Department of Communication, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA

Video: NIU Campus I Northern Illinois University

1. Abstract

Abstract

This essay argues that it is the machine that constitutes the symptom of ethics— “symptom” understood as that excluded “part that has no part” in the system of moral consideration. Ethics, which has been historically organized around a human or at least biological subject, needs the machine to define the proper limits of the moral community even if it simultaneously excludes such mechanisms from any serious claim on moral consideration. The argument will proceed in five steps or movements. The first part will define and characterize “the symptom” as it has been operationalized in the work of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Although Žižek appropriates this term from Jacques Lacan, he develops the concept in a unique way that exceeds Lacan’s initial psychoanalytic formulations. The second and third parts will demonstrate how the machine constitutes the symptom of moral philosophy, showing how and why it comprises the always already excluded element necessary to define the proper limits of moral subjectivity. The fourth part will then consider two alternatives that promise, but ultimately fail, to accommodate this symptom. And the final section will draw out the consequences of this analysis for ethics and its excluded others.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, ethics, machine, psychoanalysis, robot

One of the persistent challenges of moral decision-making is determining exactly who or what deserves ethical consideration. Although initially limited to “other men,” the practice of ethics has evolved in such a way that it continually challenges its own exclusions and comes to encompass previously marginalized individuals and groups—foreigners, women, animals, and even the environment. Despite these progressive efforts at inclusion or what animal rights philosopher Peter Singer (1973) has called “liberation movements,” one thing remains outside the community of legitimate social subjects—the machine. Traditionally characterized as a mere instrument or “means to an end,” these technological artifacts have been and remain the excluded other. As J. Storrs Hall (2001) explains, “we have never considered ourselves to have ‘moral’ duties to our machines, or them to us” (unpaginated). And yet, despite this almost absolute categorical exclusion, ethics seems to need and to be unable to do without these mechanisms.

This essay argues that it is the machine that constitutes the symptom of ethics— “symptom” understood as that excluded “part that has no part.” Ethics, which has been historically organized around a human or at least biological subject, needs the machine to define the proper limits of the moral community even if it simultaneously excludes such mechanisms from any serious claim on ethics. Consequently, the machine in general and the automaton, or self-moving machine in particular, constitutes the other of the Other that must be excluded in order to define the legitimate boundaries of the moral community (e.g., who is and what is not considered to be a subject of rights and obligations).

The argument will proceed in several steps or movements. The first will define and characterize “the symptom” as it has been operationalized in the work of Slavoj Žižek. Although Žižek appropriates this term from Jacques Lacan, he develops the concept in a unique way that exceeds Lacan’s initial psychoanalytic formulations. The second and third parts will demonstrate how the machine constitutes the symptom of ethics, showing how and why it comprises the always already excluded element necessary to define the proper limits of moral subjectivity. The fourth part will then consider two alternatives that promise, but ultimately fail, to accommodate this symptom. And the final section will draw out the consequences of this analysis for communication ethics and the excluded other.