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This article reveals how loveability influences perceptions of liveliness in robots and humans, suggesting significant societal implications.
How is it that some people become concerned with non-living robots’ ‘rights’ while many humans and animals are still permitted to die? There is a socially-constructed symbolic hierarchy of beings and objects within which, at times, commodities are valued over the living. While there are many works that have thought about hierarchies of the human, few have adequately conceptualized the role of love in affording protected statuses to living beings as well as non-living objects in this hierarchy. This article outlines genealogies of narrative-encoding reproducing conditions of normative loveability to Western coloniality. It critically explores the role of love in wrongfully attributing lives that matter to an AI-embodying sex doll, an infant-imitating sociable robot, and an experimental transhumanist cyborg. The article proposes loveability is a key factor impacting the symbolic liveliness of living beings and non-living objects ancillary to the dominant Man in the hierarchy of liveliness.
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Jenny Carla Moran (2025) studied this question.
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