Abstract
Recent years have seen a growing interest in the ethics of sex robots, fuelled by the technology industry's ability to build better and better robots that can be used as sex toys (such as realdoll.com). Although the pros and cons of sex robots have been discussed for several years in the philosophy of technology, only a few contributions have focussed on child sex robots. None of these prior essays have examined a Kantian approach to the question of whether one should allow people to use child robots as sex toys. Accordingly, this article considers the possibility of using Kant either in support of or in opposition to child sex robots. The conclusion is that a Kantian approach yields inconclusive results and is therefore ill-equipped to solve this particular moral problem.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 132-147 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Journal of Applied Philosophy |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Feb 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:One of us, John‐Stewart Gordon, would like to thank Gert Helgesson, the Director of the Centre for Healthcare Ethics (CHE), at the Karolinska Institut (Stockholm) for the opportunity to provide me with an excellent place for a research stay which I used to draft some of the main arguments in the article in 2020. His and his colleagues' support were greatly appreciated. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments which really helped us to further improve the article. Gordon's work on this article was funded by the European Social Fund according to the activity ‘Improvement of researchers’ qualification by implementing world‐class R&D projects of Measure No. 09.3.3‐LMT‐K‐712. Sven Nyholm's work is part of the research program Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies, which is funded through the Gravitation program of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO grant number 024.004.031). 1
Funding Information:
One of us, John-Stewart Gordon, would like to thank Gert Helgesson, the Director of the Centre for Healthcare Ethics (CHE), at the Karolinska Institut (Stockholm) for the opportunity to provide me with an excellent place for a research stay which I used to draft some of the main arguments in the article in 2020. His and his colleagues' support were greatly appreciated. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments which really helped us to further improve the article. Gordon's work on this article was funded by the European Social Fund according to the activity ?Improvement of researchers? qualification by implementing world-class R&D projects of Measure No. 09.3.3-LMT-K-712. Sven Nyholm's work is part of the research program Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies, which is funded through the Gravitation program of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO grant number 024.004.031).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. Journal of Applied Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Applied Philosophy
Funding
One of us, John‐Stewart Gordon, would like to thank Gert Helgesson, the Director of the Centre for Healthcare Ethics (CHE), at the Karolinska Institut (Stockholm) for the opportunity to provide me with an excellent place for a research stay which I used to draft some of the main arguments in the article in 2020. His and his colleagues' support were greatly appreciated. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments which really helped us to further improve the article. Gordon's work on this article was funded by the European Social Fund according to the activity ‘Improvement of researchers’ qualification by implementing world‐class R&D projects of Measure No. 09.3.3‐LMT‐K‐712. Sven Nyholm's work is part of the research program Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies, which is funded through the Gravitation program of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO grant number 024.004.031). 1