Relational Ethics A New Approach to the Subject of Moral Status

David J. Gunkel (PhD, Philosophy) is an award-winning educator, researcher, and author specializing in the philosophy of technology, with a focus on the moral and legal challenges posed by artificial intelligence and robots. He has authored more than 110 scholarly articles and published fifteen books, including Thinking Otherwise: Philosophy, Communication, Technology (Purdue University Press, 2007), The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics (MIT Press, 2012), Of Remixology: Ethics and Aesthetics After Remix (MIT Press, 2016), Robot Rights (MIT Press, 2018), Person, Thing, Robot: A Moral and Legal Ontology for the 21st Century and Beyond (MIT Press, 2023), and Handbook on the Ethics of AI (Edward Elgar, 2024). He is Presidential Research, Scholarship and Artistry Professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University, USA, and Professor of Applied Ethics at Łazarski University in Warsaw, Poland.

Abootaleb Safdari is a philosopher of technology and former mechanical engineer. He earned his PhD in Philosophy of Science and Technology from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, and subsequently served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Philosophy at the University of Bremen, Germany, where he worked on the Humans on Mars project. His research focuses on human–AI and human–robot interaction at the intersection of technology, ethics, and cognition. Drawing on phenomenologically inspired enactivism, he is developing a novel relational framework for understanding human–machine relations, particularly our relationships with artificial intelligence and robots, with empathy as its central organizing concept. This framework approaches human–machine relations not simply in terms of the properties or capacities of humans and machines considered separately, but as relations that emerge through embodied interaction. His work has appeared in leading journals, including Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences , Philosophy & Technology , and AI & Society . His recent publications include “Genuine Empathy with Inanimate Objects” (2021) and “From Basic Empathy to Basic Trust in Human-Robot Interaction” (2023). He organized the “Phenomenology of Human-Technology Relation” workshop in July 2023 and teaches a course on the philosophy of AI.