Levinasian Ethics Reframes Human-Robot Responsibility

The paper, titled “Examining ethical challenges in human–robot interaction using a Levinasian framework,” argues that current human-centric discourses struggle to articulate responsibility and justice for hybrid human-robot assemblages. Walther contends that adopting an ethical pluralism, which balances multiple principles and perspectives, is insufficient. Instead, he suggests that Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of infinite, asymmetrical responsibility to the Other offers a more productive lens for diagnosing how human-robot interaction can both expose and reproduce systemic vulnerabilities and forms of subjugation.

The article is grounded in concrete examples from healthcare robotics, autonomous vehicles, and algorithmic governance. These domains illustrate what Walther terms “Problem C,” which involves the attribution of responsibility and distributed agency in human-robot interaction. The paper explicitly connects Levinasian responsibility to current discussions of the “problem of many hands,” mediation and narrative approaches in technology ethics, care-centered design in robotics, and value elicitation for technology design. By drawing on Jacques Derrida’s account of law and justice, Object-Oriented Ontology, and the material turn, Walther elaborates the distinction and interplay between ethics and law, arguing that legal norms must remain responsive to a more primordial ethical obligation that cannot be fully codified.

Walther identifies two relational turns that shift the philosophical and practical understanding of human-robot interaction. The first relational turn, advocated by Gunkel, shifts the focus from ontology to epistemology. This approach moves away from framing robots as objects within material and legal frameworks to emphasizing the relational and situational contexts of interaction. Rather than questioning what a robot is or whether it possesses sentience, this turn asks what is happening in the relational dynamics between humans and robots. This shift challenges traditional legal frameworks that aim to fix the ontological status of robots, instead foregrounding the fluidity and ephemerality of situational ethics.

However, this reliance on relational contexts introduces what Walther calls Problem A: the fragmentation of ethics. If every interaction is an ethical event with the absolute Other, universal legal principles become destabilized, creating the risk of incoherence and conflict among ethical frameworks. For instance, the ethical expectations placed on robots in healthcare may vary significantly from those in law enforcement or domestic settings, yet there are no overarching principles to guide these disparate applications. This fragmentation underscores the need for flexible legal approaches that can adapt to the contextual variability of human-robot interactions, while also highlighting the temporal dimension of ethics as situational norms evolve over time.

The second relational turn reframes robots not as victims of human exploitation but as instruments of human subjugation. Drawing on the work of Gerdes, Walther notes that humans have started to be treated like robots through their integration into systems of algorithmic governance and labor automation. Examples include Amazon’s warehouse robotics systems, which optimize human labor to near-mechanical precision, and Apple’s assembly plants in China, where humans are treated as extensions of non-sentient algorithms. This shift introduces Problem B: the ambiguity of responsibility. It raises the question of whether robots are culpable as autonomous actors or if responsibility lies with the humans who design, deploy, and profit from robotic systems.

Problem B destabilizes the politico-ontological foundation of justice and law, echoing Derrida’s critique of the mystical foundation of authority. Walther explains that by mystical, Derrida does not mean supernatural, but rather that the ultimate ground of legal authority is inaccessible to rational demonstration. Every legal order rests on an inaugural decision that cannot be justified by the very rules it brings into being. When questions of responsibility in human-robot interaction are settled by appealing to existing categories such as manufacturer liability or operator negligence, they tacitly presuppose such a foundation. The attribution of fault appears self-evident only because a particular legal-technical order has already been instituted and naturalized, masking a history of decisions in which some forms of vulnerability were recognized while others were excluded.

The tensions between Problems A and B culminate in Problem C, where justice and law intersect with language. Walther argues that justice, as a responsiveness to singular relational contexts, resists codification, while law demands universality and structure. The discourse surrounding justice and law is inherently human-centric, shaped by binary oppositions such as human/non-human and subject/object. Contemporary Object-Oriented Ontology and the material turn complicate this discourse by attributing agency and justice to non-human entities. This philosophical shift raises fundamental questions about how justice can be articulated without imposing anthropocentric biases and whether language itself can escape the binaries that constrain our understanding of relationality.

In the context of healthcare robotics, Walther illustrates how a care robot failing to notify staff of a patient’s deterioration forces legal language to translate a distributed socio-technical process into categories such as negligence or malfunction. The Levinasian ethical singularity of the encounter is flattened into general legal categories, while the distributed nature of responsibility across software, hardware, and institutional context resists neat attribution. Similarly, in autonomous vehicles, public discussion frequently oscillates between blaming the robot driver, the human occupant, or the manufacturer. Legal doctrine tends to divide responsibility into pre-existing categories that sit uneasily with systems that learn over time and are shaped by opaque machine-learning pipelines.

Walther proposes that a Levinasian framework offers a distinct justificatory orientation compared to conventional ethical pluralism. For Levinas, ethics is not a matter of balancing principles but of being claimed by the Other prior to any theoretical or legal mediation. The Other’s vulnerability imposes an infinite, asymmetrical obligation upon the self, which precedes and exceeds any rights-talk. This approach shifts attention from rights to obligations, asking not whether robots have rights, but what we owe to concrete others in socio-technical situations. It resists the tendency of ethical pluralism to flatten relations into symmetrical stakeholder negotiations, instead foregrounding how some Others are systematically exposed and rendered precarious.

The paper concludes that the convergence of Problems A, B, and C urges a more explicit articulation of the relationship between ethics and law in human-robot interaction. Walther argues that law must be continually exposed to ethical critique, while ethics must be attentive to the material and institutional realities through which obligations are enacted. A Levinasian understanding of responsibility as too much underwrites calls for distributed but non-diluted accountability in human-robot interaction. Designers, corporations, regulators, and users each bear a share of an obligation that can never be fully discharged, requiring legal instruments to keep this obligation visible and contestable rather than obscuring it behind claims of technical inevitability or algorithmic neutrality.

Subject of Research: Philosophical framework for ethical responsibility in human-robot interaction

Article Title: Examining ethical challenges in human–robot interaction using a Levinasian framework

Article References: Walther, B. K. (2026). Examining ethical challenges in human–robot interaction using a Levinasian framework. Discover Robotics, 2(1), Article 5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44430-026-00021-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44430-026-00021-9

Keywords: human-robot interaction, Levinasian ethics, robotics, ethical responsibility, algorithmic governance, healthcare robotics, autonomous vehicles, legal theory, Object-Oriented Ontology, Discover Robotics, Examining, ethical