Phenomenology and Sex Robots: A Phenomenological Analysis of Sex Robots, Threesomes, and Love Relationships

Introduction

Engineering constantly changes our way of living by developing new digital technologies. Digital technologies are pervasively used, they touch many aspects of everyday life, and they are ubiquitously embedded in common objects around us. For example, digital technologies are starting to be interwoven in the clothes people use, like in smart textiles (Liberati, 2019; Schneegass & Amft, 2017). They constantly monitor people’s activities by being mounted on their bodies like wearable computers (Motti, 2020). Digital technologies can even be part of the most private moments of people's lives since some of them are designed to capture data from their sexual activities (Arnold, 2020; Gomes & Wu, 2020; Liberati, 2017; Lupton, 2015; Sharon, 2017; Sparrow, 2019; Wagner & Broll, 2014).

Today even robots can be so personal and close to us to be our lovers and to have sexual intercourse with us (Balistreri, 2018; Levy, 2009; Yulianto & Shidarta, 2015). Not only engineering attracts many attentions from philosophers in relation to the values embedded in the technologies developed and their praxes in general (Umbrello & Baum, 2018; Umbrello, Torres, & De Bellis, 2020; van de Poel, 2009), but many researchers study the effects on society the introduction these particular robots will have from many angles (Behrendt, 2018; Bond, 2007; Cheok, Devlin, & Levy, 2017; Liberati, 2018b; Sparrow, 2017, 2019). One of the main characteristics of robots that triggered these studies is their anthropomorphic aspect and the ethical and moral values embedded in the interactions with a human being. Are they to be treated as objects, or do they deserve rights? Does misbehaving towards sex robots reflect badly on who we are and on our society? Do sex robots harm and threaten our moral values (Behrendt, 2020; Fosch-Villaronga & Poulsen, 2020; Mackenzie, 2018; Rigotti, 2020; Sparrow, 2017, 2020; Weiss, 2020; Yamaguchi, 2020). In most of these lines of research, sex robots are considered when in direct relation with other human beings, and they highlight the effects of human-robot relations on the people using these robots. For example, research focus on the sexual intercourse between human beings and sex robots and the values at stake in having intimacy with a robot (Cheok et al., 2017; González-González, Gil-Iranzo, & Paderewsky, 2019; Lee, 2017; Richardson, 2016).¹