Reflections on Science Fiction as Philosophy, Plus Zombie Robots

Last weekend, two interviews of me came out. One is a long interview (about 6000 words) at with Nigel Warburton at Five Books on science fiction as a way of doing philosophy, including my recommendation of five great books of philosophical science fiction.

From the interview:

You could say that science fiction is a good teaching tool -- that it’s not really philosophy, but it’s good for popularising philosophical questions or getting people who might not otherwise be attracted to philosophy to think about philosophical questions. But serious philosophy takes the form of the expository essay, the journal article, the monograph. I don’t agree with that. I think serious philosophy can take a variety of forms.

Consider a classic of recent moral philosophy, Bernard Williams’ essay ‘Moral Luck’. That essay turns on an imaginary version of the story of Gauguin. Had Williams’ treatment of Gaugin been more detailed and more complex, it might have been even more philosophically interesting, as some subsequent commentators have pointed out. The more detail, the more we understand the complex dilemma that Gaugin faced, concerning his hopes for being a great artist and what the difficulties of leaving his family might be....

There’s a reason that philosophers sometimes reach for sketching mini-fictions in their writing. Those mini-fictions achieve something that can’t be as effectively achieved through more abstract prose. But as long as it remains a mini-fiction contained within an essay, it’s going to be somewhat impoverished as a fiction... It’s a kind of historical accident that philosophers almost exclusively write expository essays now. That’s not historically been the case.

Check out the interview also for discussion of the philosophical ideas in my five recommended books:

Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
Greg Egan, Diaspora
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Olaf Stapledon, Sirius

Also last weekend, Barry Lam dropped the latest episode of his philosophical podcost Hi-Phi Nation -- this one on zombies. Philosophers who work on consciousness will be unsurprised to hear that David Chalmers features centrally in the episode. Christina Van Dyke and John Edgar Browning are also featured.

The episode concludes with some of my reflections on what I've called the Full Rights Dilemma for Future Robots -- the question of what we should do if we ever create machines whose moral status is unclear, machines who might or might not genuinely have conscious experiences like ours and thus might or might not deserve moral consideration similar to that of human beings. Do we give them the full rights of human beings, including rights to health care, rescue, and the vote, and thus risk (if they aren't actually conscious) sacrificing real human interests for empty machines without moral status worth the sacrifice? Or do we deny them full rights, and risk (if they do actually have rich conscious lives like ours) perpetrating mass slavery and murder?