Ethical Behaviorism and Relational Turn as Two Manifestations of Anti-Anthropocentrism

This text discusses three positions within the debate on the moral status of robots. The first, referred to as the “orthodox” position, expresses the still-dominant anthropocentric view in contemporary Western culture, which assigns humans a privileged, central status due to their unique qualities such as consciousness, emotions, free will, etc. The two alternative positions to the orthodox view, ethical behaviorism and relational turn, propose different criteria for attributing moral status than the aforementioned qualities and are interpreted as manifestations of a tendency to deny the unique ontological and axiological status of humans. In the case of ethical behaviorism, humans are “trivialized” to the level of other entities in a reductionist-naturalistic manner, whereas the relational turn involves “extraordinarizing” the non-human by re-legitimizing magical thinking in a posthumanist spirit. Thus, the article illustrates how contemporary cultural tendencies towards dual elimination of human uniqueness, based on reductionist naturalism and magical posthumanism, are revealed in the discussion on the moral status of robots.