ABSTRACT
To many people the notion of robots having rights is unthinkable, irrespective of whether one speaks from an “everything is alive perspective” or an “only man is alive” viewpoint. Yet as Christopher Stone argues, in an article with the intriguing title “Should Trees Have Standing?— Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects”, throughout legal history each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been, to some extent, unthinkable:
And speaking of living things, there is no evidence that plants or trees, for example, are conscious, but that is not to say that we have no moral duty to them. That the subject of robot rights deserves serious attention is attested to by the fact that it has been debated by, inter alia, the judiciary of the state of Hawaii, which has developed a “Futures Research” component that investigates the rights of robots.
