Why Sex Robots Should Fear Us

This paper explores a line of concern underrepresented in the emerging debate about sex robots, arguing for caution in their development. Today’s sex robots cannot suffer because they lack sentience. However, future sex robots that may be sentient could suffer harm due to precedents set today regarding behaviors toward their non-sentient predecessors. The challenge emerges from our lack of philosophically uncontested criteria for sentience in a robot. This paper discusses the phenomenon of spillover, described by Robert Nozick as a situation in which members of one moral category are treated in ways appropriate to another. In the case of sex robots, spillover occurs when robots that could be sentient are treated in ways appropriate to robots that are certainly not sentient. Sex robots could cause harmful spillover.