ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the moral and legal standing of robots, and seeks to develop a response to the following question—can robots have rights? For Solaiman, the question revolves around the extent to which robots can fulfill legal duties, which are “responsibilities commanded by law to do or to forbear something for the benefit of others, the failure in, or disobedience of, which will attract a remedy”. For Bryson, robots should not be assigned the status of either moral agents or moral patients because doing so would place human interests in competition with the interests of artificial entities, which is unethical. Bryson agrees with Solaiman that while humans have the power to assign legal duties and legal rights to any entity, these forms of recognition are only available to “agents capable of knowing those rights and carrying out those duties”.
