BOOK REVIEW David J. Gunkel: The machine question: critical perspectives on AI, robots, and ethics MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012, 272 pp, ISBN-10: 0-262-01743-1, ISBN-13: 978-0-262-01743-5 Mark Coeckelbergh Published online: 3 November 2012 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012 Are machines worthy of moral consideration? Can they be included in the moral community? What is the moral status of machines? Can they be moral agents, or (at least) moral patients? Can we create ‘‘moral machines’’? In the past decade, there has been a growing interest in these ques- tions, especially within the fields of what some call ‘‘robot ethics’’ and others ‘‘machine ethics’’. David Gunkel’s The Machine Question, however, differs from much of the existing literature since it does not aim to offer answers to these particular questions. Instead of arguing for a partic- ular position in the debate, the author attends to the ques- tion itself. What is the question we are asking if we ask about the ‘‘moral considerability’’ of machines? How is the problem framed? What does this frame reveal and what does it exclude? Gunkel begins his book by remarking that ‘‘the machine question’’ is new: for most of Western intellectual history, technology has been defined in an instrumental way (p. 6). Even philosophical work on the moral considerability of animals is relatively recent. But whereas today many people accept that (some) animals deserve our moral con- sideration, machines remain the excluded ‘other’: ‘the other that remains outside and marginalized by contem- porary philosophy’s recent concern for an interest in oth- ers.’ (p. 5) Throughout the book, Gunkel describes many of the mechanisms of this exclusion. For example, he draws our attention to Descartes’s ‘‘beast-machine’’ and to how the moral line between humans and things is drawn by the words ‘‘who’’ and ‘‘what’’. But he also shows that current attempts to end this exclusion are highly problematic. In the first chapter the author shows many of the com- plications with arguments for including machines as moral agents. For example, he shows not only that certain con- cepts such as consciousness (p. 55) and personhood (p. 90) are problematic—this is generally acknowledged by phi- losophers across the spectrum—but also that there are epistemological problems involved with ascribing these properties to other entities. In particular, as Dennett and Derrida point out, participants in the debate make a ‘leap from some externally observable phenomenon to a pre- sumption (whether negative or positive) concerning inter- nal operations’; such an inference is unfounded (p. 64). In Chapter 2, some similar complications are discussed. For example, it turns out that the criterion ‘‘can they suffer?’’ is problematic. What is suffering? Is it the same as feeling pain? Does it require consciousness? Again the epistemo- logical question is raised: ‘If animals (or machines) have an inner mental life, how would we ever know it?’ (p. 117). Furthermore, Gunkel agrees with Birch (1993) that the very work of demarcation, every attempt of drawing a line between those who are part of the club and those who are outsiders—the very effort to apply criteria of inclusion/ exclusion—is an act of violence. The very way the ‘Machine Question’ is asked legitimates the domination and exploi- tation of others (p. 30). In particular, Gunkel shows that ‘‘the machine’’ plays a key role in this process. Showing how Descartes divided human beings from the animal–machine, Gunkel argues that ‘the machine is not just one kind of excluded other; it is the very mechanism of the exclusion of the other.’ (p. 128) Indeed, as Gunkel puts it: ‘whenever a philosophy endeavors to make a deci- sion, to demarcate and draw the line separating ‘‘us’’ M. Coeckelbergh (&) Department of Philosophy, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands e-mail: m.coeckelbergh@utwente.nl 123 Ethics Inf Technol (2013) 15:235–238 DOI 10.1007/s10676-012-9305-y