by Kip Rodes
Part 1 – Cyborg as Citizen
In 1985, Donna Haraway’s pathbreaking A Cyborg Manifesto noted the technological and conceptual breakdown of boundaries between human and animal; between organism and machine; and between material and ideal. Haraway wrote of the cyborg, a creature “simultaneously animal and machine”, which “appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed”, and which makes ambiguous “the difference between natural and artificial”. For Haraway, the cyborg represents both the threat of ultimate realization of the depersonalized, materialist, patriarchal arc of history and the promise of a broadly-embracing communal connection untethered from “the myth of original unity”.
In the decades since Haraway wrote, the boundaries have become progressively more blurred, and their outright breach has come to appear ever more inevitable. Against this background, is it time to recognize the cyborg as a member of the body politic, and hence as a constituent part of the Leviathan? In a word, no.
In addressing this question, we speak not of the metaphorical cyborg in Haraway’s sense that “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are cyborgs.” Rather, we are considering the anthropomorphic machine, which despite being “disturbingly lively” has no will or judgment save that with which it is programmed. As we will see below, that programmed intelligence endows the cyborg with such potential for good or ill that we should adopt a strict ethic governing its deployment. But for all that the cyborg is not one of us, and cannot be governed by the rules we make for ourselves.
The Hobbesian Social Contract is not a compact among all beings. Rather, it is an implicit agreement among the members of the polity submit their individual will and their judgment to the collective will and judgment, as embodied in the Leviathan. In the words of the Declaration of Independence, the government derives its just powers “from the consent of the governed”. So a necessary (but probably not sufficient) condition for membership in the polity is that the citizen’s will and judgment be fairly ascertainable. This requires line-drawing, even if the precise contours of the lines elude us. For example, at least for now (and probably for the foreseeable future), we cannot fairly or reliably know the will or judgment of animals who cannot speak our languages. That is, although we know empathetically that our fellow animals must want clean air and water, a habitable climate, and reliable food sources (and they doubtless prefer not to be hunted or eaten), our representation of those animal preferences is a matter of our stewardship rather that the animals’ agency.
More to the point, we don’t owe any such representation to our own creations. Indeed, considerations of political balance require that we exclude the cyborg from membership in the polity. In their 1981 article Unscrewing the big Leviathan, Calon & LaTour usefully describe how initially equal actors in the body politic grow in scale by taking on authority to speak or act for others through “negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence”. An actor grows within the polity as the habits and modes of thought that give rise to its authority become stable—metaphorically placed within a “black box” where (although theoretically reversible) they may be taken for granted and need not be reconsidered. But the “will”, or “judgment” of a cyborg, no matter how percipient, is the ultimate black box asset. Provided we eschew what Faraday labeled a “paranoid” belief in machine autonomy, a cyborg’s will is reliably and permanently aligned with that of its creator / programmer. And in view of their inherent scalability, recognition of cyborgs as members of the body politic would inevitably amplify their owners’ wills and so drown out the wills of the natural persons traditionally recognized as citizens. On the other hand, because cyborgs are merely products of human artifice, they may be excluded from the polity as a matter of morally-neutral expedience. As UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST) observed in its 2017 Report on Robotics Ethics, dignity—a core value recognized in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights—is “inherent to human beings, not to machines or robots.” In sum, at least for purposes of the Social Contract we must agree with Dilbert: “artificial life forms have no rights”.
Part 2 – A Cyborg Ethic
That non-citizens—foreigners, children, future generations, animals, plants, land, works of art, and yes, cyborgs—are not members of the body politic does not mean that their interests are unrepresented, however. Rather, the relationship of the Leviathan to non-citizens is derivative of the myriad relationships of citizens to non-citizens (just as the relationship of the Leviathan to citizens is derivative of their relationships to each other). Thus, the Leviathan’s vicarious authority to represent the will of the citizenry carries with it the vicarious representation of their solicitude toward non-citizens affected by their individual and collective actions.
How may we characterize that solicitude? Although Hobbes proffered a reductive account of human motivation as concerned with the desire for a commodious life and the pursuit of power to secure that end, a fuller account of human nature must recognize our altruistic, or ethical, motives as well.
In Hobbes in the Anthropocene: Reconsidering the State of Nature in Its Relevance for Governing, Maximilian Lakitsch points the way toward reincorporating into a neo-Hobbesian theory of governance our relationships with “nonhuman actors” who codetermine our agency.
As Latkitsch explains:
According to Hobbes, every human being is fundamentally constituted through its relations to other human beings, their situations, and an infinity of nonhuman factors. In essence, one’s situation depends on one’s position within a complex web of human–nature interrelationships….In the end, the political subject that governing has to respond to is an infinitely interrelated multitude of nonhuman and human beings, things, and phenomena, which articulates itself through the subjects bearing a strong sense of relationality and collectivity…. The multitude articulates the plurality of everyone’s urge to be “drawn to desire that which is Good for him and to Avoid what is bad for him” on the foundation of everyone’s enlarged sense of being interrelated with human and nonhuman others.
As individual and collective wielders of power, our relations with “nonhuman others” should be characterized by ethical stewardship. In A Sand County Almanac, written in the mid-20th Century, the naturalist Aldo Leopold defined an “ethic” in ecological terms as “a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence”, originating in “the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of cooperation.” Leopold posits a holistic ecological version of the Hobbesian Social Contract, predicated on ethics: “Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content.”
Of course, ethics are not static. Leopold pointed out that over the years, “ethical criteria have been extended to many fields of conduct, with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by expediency only.” Leopold’s principal concern was to argue, eloquently, for establishment of a “land ethic” which would “enlarge the boundaries” of the interdependent community to which we owe our respect, “to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” Albert Einstein notably echoed Leopold’s call in a 1950 letter: “A human being is part of a whole…. Our task must be to free ourselves…. by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” These ethical attitudes of respect and compassion are the types of values which may be articulated through the governing Leviathan.
Indeed, in theorizing a more-encompassing polity for the Anthropocene—the present era, in which Man has achieved dominance over, or at least coequal power with, Nature—Lakitsch appears wholly to embrace Leopold’s land ethic, and to carry it full-fledged into the constitutive authority of the Leviathan.
Governing based on an interpretation of subjectivity deriving from the state of nature creates a fluid and inclusive conception of political space that is constituted through the Hobbesian multitude. This space comprises all human and nonhuman particularities that subjects are interrelated with: Everything that affects everyday life is politically relevant. That turns modernist conceptions of governing upside-down. It emphasizes that human and other living and nonliving entities are not at the mercy of any kind of sovereign power. On the contrary, the ability of governing is built upon the acknowledgment of the full diversity of human and nonhuman particularities that are of relevance for agency.
So we have the theoretical tools to incorporate ethic in general, and the land ethic in particular, into our Hobbesian political science. Well, then, what about the cyborg? As Leopold observed, “Man’s invention of tools has enabled him to make changes of unprecedented violence, rapidity and scope.” Already, we have military drones that function with increasing independence from their remote, detached human operators, gathering intelligence, defending themselves, and even assassinating designated human targets. We have “deep learning” computers that can solve hitherto intractable problems, and can readily defeat the strongest human chess players. And the pace of change will only accelerate as we sharpen our AI skills. If we have not yet seen the dawn of the “self-moving, self-designing, autonomous” machines contemplated by Haraway, we can certainly foresee that day. What we need now is an AI ethic.
Whereas the land ethic vicariously casts the Leviathan in his familiar role as protector—protecting Nature against our individual and collective abuse—an AI ethic does not seek to protect the cyborg, but rather to protect us all against unconstrained growth in the cyborg’s power. Moreover, it must add protection against the Leviathan himself embracing the unconstrained power that the cyborg promises. An AI ethic probably requires some form of the “precautionary principle”, which bespeaks caution in deployment of transformative technologies whose effects we cannot wholly foresee. As Leopold observed over 70 years ago, “man-made changes are of a different order than evolutionary changes, and have effects more comprehensive than is intended or foreseen.”
The need for an AI ethic has increasingly been recognized among scholars, think tanks, and more recently international organizations. For example, COMEST’s 2017 Report on Robotics Ethics recognized that due to inherent uncertainty the precautionary principle “is particularly significant in the development of autonomous robots (cognitive robots) with deep learning capacity”. The contours of such an ethic are very much in flux, however. Whereas COMEST concluded that “there is a strong moral principle against an armed robot killing a human being” and that legally and ethically “machines should not be making life or death decisions about humans”, UNESCO’s recent (Nov. 2021) Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence watered the principle down to the guideline that “[a]s a rule, life and death decisions should not be ceded to AI systems.”
Part 3 – Leviathan as Cyborg
Haraway derived her conception of the cyborg from “contemporary science fiction”. Not long after she wrote, the Star Trek series introduced a new variant: the Borg, a cyborg collective with a “hive” intelligence, which assimilates new members as opportunity permits. Although an individual cyborg may lack the agency necessary to qualify as a member of a Hobbesian body politic, the collective Borg appears well-suited to serve as an updated version of Hobbes’s Leviathan.
Viewed (in accordance with Lakitsch) as embodying the authority of a dynamic network of multi-faceted relationships, rather than merely static contractual regimen, Leviathan is organic, growing, and humanoid. He is a creature made by man in his own image, with a regulated collective intelligence: in short, a cyborg.
The essential feature of every cyborg—every man-made creature—including the Leviathan, is that we are the authors of its power, and we are therefore responsible for the deployment of that power. In view of the ethical and relational insights of Leopold and Lakitsch, we must ensure that in submitting our will and our judgment to the collective embodied in the Leviathan, we also endow him with our ethics.
