Robot rights? Towards a social-relational justification of moral consideration

Giving rights to an entity is a particularly strong form of moral consideration: it implies that the entity in question has inherent worth and that therefore the entity needs to be treated as such irrespective of all other (human or non-human) considerations. It is connected to the deontological and natural rights traditions in moral theory, which in turn can be interpreted as secular continuations of the Jewish-Christian idea that the person has an inherent worth as a creature of God.¹ Hence, rights are given a kind of quasi-sacred status: any violation of them counts as a secular version of sin. In the Kantian tradition, the spiritual nature of man is replaced² by the rational nature of persons. According to Kant, anyone who violates rights does not take into consideration that, ‘as rational beings’, others should at the same time be treated as ends (Kant 1785, p. 92).³ In such Enlightenment arguments, direct references to religion or spirituality are absent. However, in modern deontological ethics the idea is retained that rights should therefore be respected at (literally) all costs. For example, human rights are seen as inalienable rights that always should be respected and that ground other goods. The first lines of the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN in 1948, holds that ‘recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’. To make a claim for robot rights in the deontological tradition, then, is to make a claim for strong moral consideration. But there are many more possible forms of moral consideration and other kinds of arguments. As Gruen remarks: ‘Being morally considerable is like showing up on a moral radar screen—how strong the signal is or where it is located on the screen are separate questions’ (Gruen 2003).

In order to explore alternative forms of moral consideration of robots and different justifications, let me make an analogy to arguments for moral consideration of animals. Regan, from a deontological position, has argued that some animals have rights since they are experiencing ‘subjects of a life’: they have wants, preferences, beliefs, feelings, memories, and expectations, and their welfare matters to them (Regan 1983). However, this is not the only kind of position in the debate. Utilitarians adopt a different approach. They reject deontological rights and if they use the language of rights they understand them as derived from utilitarian principles. For them, what counts is not the protection of inalienable rights but the promotion of happiness, pleasure or interests and the avoidance of suffering or frustration of interests. Singer has argued that any being—human or non-human—that is sentient and therefore has an interest in not suffering deserves to have that interest taken into account (Singer 1975, 1993). This implies that utilitarians can give moral consideration to humans and non-humans alike, provided that they are sentient. In practice, this means that the boundary of moral consideration is wider than in the rights approach, since there may be many animals that cannot be considered subjects-of-a-life but that are sentient.

In spite of the many differences between these positions, which I will not discuss here, there are many similarities as well. Both arguments demand moral consistency: it is argued that the human/non-human distinction is not morally relevant when it comes to treatment of animals. The reasoning may go as follows. In human history, animals have always been enslaved and mistreated because they were (and are) considered to be non-human. However, why should we restrict rights to humans? It is speciecist to do so. ‘Speciecism’ is a term Singer ascribed to his opponents and refers to the view that a certain species, here humans, is superior to other species (Singer 1975). But why should the species barrier be a moral barrier? Singer has argued that we should take sentience (and therefore an interest in not suffering) as a criterion, not being a member of a certain species—be it the human species or another one. Similarly, Regan has questioned the human/non-human distinction as a moral distinction for ascribing rights (Regan 1983). Thus, both Singer and Regan appeal to the demand for consistency: they share the view that if we take a certain characteristic to be grounds for ascribing rights in humans, we should be consistent and do the same for non-humans that have the same characteristic in common, e.g. sentience (Singer) or being the subject of your life (Regan).

In the ethics of robotics literature, the emancipatory mission that motivates the call for robot rights is not always present or made explicit; however, the analogy to animal rights can always be drawn and is sometimes made explicit. Calverley, for instance, has explored the analogy between the debate on rights for androids and animal rights. Discussing the similarities between animals and androids, he has pointed to the issue of the relation between our ideas of consciousness and our concept of rights (Calverley 2006). And McNally and Inayatullah (1998) have put the discussion about robot rights within a broader historical and cultural framework. But regardless of the particular perspective of the authors, the arguments always draw on ontological features of the entity that are seen as morally significant.

This reveals a deeper argumental similarity between the rights and utilitarian position in the discussions about robots and about animals. Both arguments for consistency (and emancipation) rely on holding a particular ontological feature of the entity in question to be sufficient for granting moral consideration to that entity: rationality, consciousness, sentience, and so on.

This approach is problematic for two kinds of reasons. Apart from well-known problems of application (for instance, what exactly counts as respecting an entity’s rights or capacity for suffering?), deontological and utilitarian accounts face problems with regard to their justification of moral consideration. Since their approach to moral consideration is based on ontological features of the entity, they incur at least the following problems.

One may object now that I have unnecessarily limited my discussion to deontological and utilitarian theory. Why not consider virtue ethics? At first sight, virtue ethics seems to avoid the problems mentioned above since it employs an indirect argument for moral consideration: if we (humans) wish to be virtuous persons, we should treat animals well. Abusing them is wrong not because it is a violation of rights or because on balance more suffering is created than with another act, but because we, as members of a moral community, do not exercise virtues such as compassion when abusing them. For instance, Hacker-Wright (2007) has argued that our answer to the question concerning moral consideration of animals depends on our conception of the demands of the virtue of justice.

By shifting the focus from the object of moral consideration to the subject of moral consideration, virtue ethics seems to avoid the problems mentioned above. The threshold is set by the virtues, there are no marginal cases within the (human) moral community where everyone is equal, we no longer need to know particular features of the entity and their relation to moral consideration, and surely the importance of ‘community’ is accounted for. However, this impression is false given the problem of application this theory faces. Not only is it unclear how we can know what the virtues are (which is a problem of justification); from the general principle, it is not clear at all (1) in relation to what entities we should exercise our (human) virtues and (2) what the application of that virtue consists in. Deontological and utilitarian approaches to moral consideration share these problems, except that they provide (ontological) criteria to respond to the first problem (which entities) whereas virtue ethics does not. Therefore, it remains unclear how it can avoid ontological justification and its problems. Moreover, it is very likely that, when pressed for it, virtue ethicists will provide that type of justification since their ethics is based on the moral status of humans and to defend that side of the argument they assume a similar ontological foundation of its human-centred ethics. In its neo-Aristotelian version, virtue ethics roots its ethics in a particular view of human nature: man is a rational animal and a ‘political animal’, that is, a being which only develops itself, and can only flourish, as part of a moral and social community. For example, Hursthouse’s ( 1999, p. 68) answer to the problem of justification is that virtue is ‘a character trait that a human being, given her (human) nature, biological and psychological, needs (…) to flourish or live well’.⁶ MacIntyre (1999) defines human nature in terms of (social) dependence: we can only flourish through developing social relationships and communities. Such neo-Aristotelian views are far more relational than the social philosophies that are home to rights and utilitarianism, but in so far as they remain Aristotelian they by definition restrict themselves to humans. Humans, for Aristotle the only rational and political beings, are the top of the pyramid of beings. Thus, in order to provide a foundation for its claims about moral consideration, a virtue ethicist will have to provide an ontology and will provide one which seems to exclude all non-humans from moral consideration. The only way to avoid this, it seems, is to put forward ontological criteria that are ‘lower’ and allow us to include some animals, robots, and other entities. But this solution leaves the theoretical boundaries of neo-Aristotelianism and (still) incurs the problems mentioned above—problems related to the reliance on ontological features.

One may object, however, that although there are problems with virtue ethics’ indirect argument, virtue ethics could say that it has a straightforward consequentialist reason why this focus on the human is acceptable: if all humans were to exercise their virtue of compassion (a virtue justified by reference to humans), then as a consequence certain animals would fare better than they do now. This argument could be applied to highly intelligent robots as well. I concede this; nevertheless I wonder how broad and systematic protection of non-humans would be. For me to develop myself into a morally high-standing being that lives the flourishing life, the best life there is for beings like us, it might be enough that I develop and exercise my compassion in relation to one animal or one robot, for example my pet animal or pet robot. If everyone does that, many animals will be treated well as a consequence. However, something seems to be missing here that renders it less ‘moral’: it goes against the intuition that the motivation for and justification of moral consideration should not have its source in our own well-being or our own moral status alone (the subject or giver of moral consideration) but at least also in the well-being or status of the object or receiver of moral consideration—an intuition shared with deontological and utilitarian theories of moral consideration.

Other indirect arguments for moral consideration face the same limitations. For instance, one can base moral consideration of animals and robots on the property rights of humans, or, more broadly, on the value we humans give to things. Indeed, we already give some moral consideration to many objects, including robots, not because we believe that they have rights or that they are sentient but because we own them or because we value them in other ways. For instance, one may protect a tree in one’s garden because one loves the view, because it contributes to the aesthetic value of the garden. Or we may protect very intelligent robots because we value them as objects to perform experiments with. The range of human values is wide and many non-humans benefit from the related practices of moral consideration. However, these arguments face similar problems as the approaches discussed above. First, in order to determine the value of a non-human it seems that we have to know its ontological status. Second, it remains doubtful how ‘moral’ this moral consideration is given that its justificatory source is entirely non-relational and non-social: it resides in the subject of moral consideration. Is there an alternative way of thinking about the issue of moral consideration?

So far I discussed two sorts of arguments for moral consideration. Direct arguments focus on the moral status of the object, whereas indirect arguments centre on the moral status of the subject. Both accounts of moral status are based on the ontological features of the entity, an approach which invites epistemological scepticism and incurs other problems. The alternative approach I propose attempts to avoid the scepticism by replacing the requirement that we have certain knowledge about real ontological features of the entity by the requirement that we experience the features of the entity as they appear to us in the context of the concrete human-robot relation and the wider social structures in which that relation is embedded. This requires further explanation.

First, moral consideration is no longer seen as being ‘intrinsic’ to the entity: instead it is seen as something that is ‘extrinsic’: it is attributed to entities within social relations and within a social context.

Second, this does not imply that features of the entity are morally insignificant. We will continue to use them as criteria on which we base our moral consideration. However, in this approach they are given a different status: they are apparent features,⁷ features-as-experienced-by-us.

Third, this experience is not context-independent and not subject-independent. It is context-dependent: in line with feminist objections to standard moral theories,⁸ this approach acknowledges the limitations of argumentation that aims at general and abstract moral principles alone. Instead, it asks more attention for the ways in which moral consideration is granted to entities in various concrete social relations and social contexts. Moreover, the experience is subject-dependent: in its response to the epistemological problem the approach learns from the phenomenological tradition in philosophy, which has proposed an interesting answer to the (false) dilemma between idealism and realism. As far as I understand the basic message of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and others, they hold that consciousness is always directed towards objects (for which phenomenologists use the technical term ‘intentionality’⁹) and that we can only have knowledge of objects as they appear to us. Applied to moral consideration, it means that moral significance resides neither in the object nor in the subject, but in the relation between the two. Objects such as robots do not exist in the human mind alone (this would amount to idealism); however, it is also true that we can only have knowledge of the object and its features as they appear in our consciousness. There is no direct, unmediated access to the robot as an objective, observer-independent reality or ‘thing-in-itself’.¹⁰

The next step I then propose is to see this subject-object relation as being shaped in social relations. What happens between subject and object takes on a form in the concrete social context, which is ‘prior’ to the moral argumentation offered by traditional theories. Deontological and utilitarian reasoning cannot be divorced from the social–historical context in which these theories emerged: modern society with its emphasis on the value of individuals and their preferences. This does not mean that these theories get it wrong or that we have no choice but to accept whatever theory is prevalent in a social context. Instead, recognising this link between theory and practice opens up an additional repertoire of moral vocabulary that helps us to distance ourselves from our usual ways of thinking and doing. In this case, it helps us to better understand the issue of moral consideration of robots by making comparisons with how we treat other non-human entities at different times and different contexts. In contrast to what the term ‘moral status’ suggests, moral consideration must be seen as subject to change. There are also differences within societies and between societies and cultures. Of course we can and must critically evaluate these differences and changes. However, if we do not go beyond the three traditional theories summarized above, then we do not pay sufficient attention to differences and changes since we occupy ourselves with general criteria alone.

On a sub-societal level the approach focuses on moral considerations in human-robot relations rather than on the moral status of humans and robots alone. The implication is that both the human and the robot are not so much considered as atomistic individuals or members of a ‘species’, but as relational entities whose identity depends on their relations with other entities. The idea is that if we live with artificially intelligent robots, we do not remain the same individuals and the same humans as we were before. Thus, the relational theory of moral consideration proposed here must be connected with a relational theory of identity and, in the end, a relational (social) ontology. Let me explain this in the next sub-section.

In social philosophy, the rights approach is connected with a contractarian social ontology. Individuals are prior to the social, which comes only into being by agreement.¹¹ Utilitarianism has a similar instrumentalist view of society: what counts is the happiness, pleasure, preferences, and interests of the individual. Society must safeguard and increase the total amount of happiness, pleasure, or other goods. For utilitarians, it is the total amount of happiness that counts, not the good of society. It is, like the contractarian society, a community of (individual) interests.¹² Even Marxism, which is usually seen as a form of collectivism, contains an individualist strand to the extent that it views society in an instrumental way. Marxists argue for collective ownership of the means of production. However, the end-goal remains formulated at an individual level: the unalienated, happy and free individual¹³ that remains at the heart of our imagination in modern times from Romanticism to contemporary consumerism. In this sense, real collectivism has never existed in the West. Even the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century (e.g. Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism, Maoism), which promoted the subordination of individuals to the state, did not embrace a radical collectivism given their leadership cults (a phenomenon that is not exclusive to totalitarianism; it can also be seen in current democratic societies). Thus, for a real contrast we must look elsewhere, beyond Western modern liberal society.

Communitarians (and virtue ethicists) have a substantially different view of the relation between individuals and society: opposing liberal individualism, they ascribe value to the community itself and see individuals as members of the community, as being shaped by that community. Authors such as MacIntyre (1984) and Taylor (1989) appear to hold a relational ontology: the point of being virtuous is the building of a moral community and there is no fundamental difference between fostering individual morality and fostering the morality of the community. In this way, both the member of the community and the community itself are not mere means to an end but ends in themselves. Thus, communitarians are neither individualist nor collectivist.¹⁴ However, communitarianism typically restricts the boundaries of the moral and social community to the human world. While there have been efforts to connect ‘community’ and ‘ecology’ by authors with ecological concerns¹⁵ and while as said above virtue ethics can employ indirect arguments for moral consideration of non-humans, following its Aristotelian roots ‘classic’ communitarianism and virtue ethics are directed at the moral quality of humans and their human communities.

A similar anthropocentric limitation can be found in most social constructionist theories. They move beyond individualist and contractualist theories by understanding individuals as dependent on social interactions and, more generally, on a social order or context that transcends them (see for instance Berger and Luckmann 1966). However, the individuals and the social context in which they shape themselves remain within the boundaries of the human. (An interesting exception is Latour’s work: it attempts to cross the nature/society distinction, the human/non-human distinction, and other conceptual distinctions Latour (1993, 2004, 2005) attributes to modern thinking by introducing the notion of the collective as a hybrid assembly of humans and non-humans. However, I will not further discuss his work here.)

Other candidates for relationalism may be found in non-modern, non-Western cultures (keeping in mind that ‘pure’ forms of these cultures do not exist, if only because today most of the countries where we would locate them, for instance in Africa or Asia, the societies are soaked with Western, modern values). For instance, it appears that traditionally Chinese and Japanese cultures involve relational ontologies: humans are not ‘individuals’ but are related to other humans and other entities.¹⁶

Ecological thinking (deep ecology and ecology as science) does seem to put emphasis on relations. In doing so it is fundamentally different from individualist, essentialist, collectivist, and totalitarian thinking. But what is the status of the relata? One answer is: they do not exist. To explore this direction of thought, we must radicalize existing concepts of natural ecology. Often it still uses early-modern organicist notions: ecology (as a branch of evolutionary biology and natural science) talks about dependencies between ‘organs’ or between ‘organisms’ and their environment. And some deep ecologists see ‘the earth’ as an organism (a misleading term by which they mean all life on earth or the ecosystem). However, if everything is truly related and interdependent, why make such a strict distinction between the border of ‘organisms’ or ‘organs’? A radically relational ecology would not accept such an ontology. There are relations between relata, but these relata have no fixed ontological reality. They might appear to us as wholes; however, this might be only appearance. But that does not matter; we can work and live with appearances. A different answer is that the relata exist, although we cannot give an essentialist definition of them but only a naturalist explanation, using evolutionary theory for example. However, this by itself does not solve the question about the ontological status of that-which-evolves.

Developing a more comprehensive social ecology will have to answer these questions. For the purpose of this paper, let me given a brief definition and description of the social ecology I have in mind, one which could serve as a basis for giving moral consideration to some robots.

A social ecology is about relations between various entities, human and non-human, which are inter-dependent and adapt to one another. These relations are morally significant and moral consideration cannot be conceived apart from these relations. Again, there is a question about the status of the relata. The social relata are individuals, groups, societies, communities, cultures, and indeed some robots provided that they participate in the social life. What is their status? We talk about them in the relata in an individualist and essentialist way since this is how they appear to us. However, the social and natural sciences show us how entities are inter-related and suggest a less individualist and non-essentialist view of the world. We may need our appearances in order to live and in order to live together. But appearances can change; we can change them as much as they change us. And in the end we do not know if these entities are real and if their boundary is fixed. This view is distinct from Buddhist ontology, which assumes that we can answer questions like these, that we can know the ultimate truth about what is and can clearly distinguish between reality and appearance.¹⁷ It is also distinct from ancient Greek essentialism and its contemporary heir: the scientific quest for ‘elementary particles’ which are supposed to be the most elementary relata.

This (social) ontology needs more work. At this point I can only say that making a relational argument cannot avoid such discussions. Arguments for moral consideration always make a jump from ‘is’ to ‘ought’, not in the sense that they mistake the normative for the descriptive, but in the sense that they rest on a view of the world, including the social world. Both relational and non-relational views of moral consideration need to make explicit their ontologies.

What follows from a social-relational ontology for moral consideration of non-human entities? Within relational views, there are no longer a priori and ontological hierarchies between entities like the ancient Aristotelian or modern neo-Aristotelian ones we are used to. This does not imply that we can no longer make moral distinctions; rather, it is not a priori decided what (apparent) moral status we give to entities on the basis of a hierarchical and essentialist ontology. Reasoning about moral consideration of other entities, then, can only be done within a relational context, one which we experience in practice or in imagination and which is always open to change. However, what can be said in addition to this? What does the social-relational approach articulated above mean for the discussion about moral consideration of intelligent robots?

Let me list some of the implications:

First, in this approach to moral consideration it no longer makes sense to talk about moral consideration of robots in general, for example robot rights. Such a manner of speaking about robots is not only misleading since it puts all robots into one category but also since it suggests that moral consideration is entirely non-relational. Instead, this approach acknowledges that moral consideration is bound up with social relations between humans and robots. Therefore, it can pay attention to similarities and differences between treatments of robots.

Second, whether or not one day we will have conscious and sentient robots, there will be a long stage in the development of robots during which artificially intelligent robots do not meet ‘high’ or ‘hard’ criteria of standard approaches to moral consideration. This situation leaves us with two options: either we deny any moral consideration to such robots or we grant them some moral consideration—that is, a different degree of moral consideration—on a different basis. Within the standard approach, the latter option may imply defining less demanding criteria, such as those proposed by Floridi and Sanders (2004). However, as a non-relational approach it does not sufficiently take into account the new social functions of intelligent robots: they appear to us as social entities, not only as machines or systems with certain features. The alternative approach proposed in this paper claims to do that by proposing a relational account of moral consideration based on a social ecology that includes humans and robots. Floridi (2008) also supports an ecological approach. However, that is an informational ecology: it is about relations between information (and ‘inforgs’ as carriers or instantiations of information). Such an approach is similar to the ‘elementary’ and essentialist approach of modern physics and ancient Greek metaphysics: it tries to find an elementary reality ‘behind’ the appearances. My approach retains the common sense idea that the world consists of a wide variety of entities—and, of course, relations between these entities—without reducing these entities to information. The implication is that attention can be paid to social relations between humans and robots and to the social structures within which these relations are shaped. This supports reflection on what (degree of) moral consideration we wish to give to those robots. On this basis, we can arrive at a range of forms of moral consideration that will be less strong than robot rights but still imply some obligations towards robots in the context of particular human-robot relations. It is not possible to say what these obligations are a priori, that is, apart from and abstracted from those relations and contexts. This does not mean that one can no longer generalize and compare between different kinds of relations and contexts. Rather, it implies that it is an illusion to think that we can have a moral theory divorced from the social world in which that theory makes sense and in which it is practiced and lived.

Of course, to talk of ‘obligations’ we put the emphasis on the giver of moral consideration. This will probably remain so as long as we feel that social robots must be given some moral consideration but not the same degree as humans, who can literally claim their rights in social contexts. However, such intuitions can and will change when some robots will appear differently to us. If that happens and one then wishes to put the emphasis on the receiver of moral consideration, one could use the language of rights but widen the moral vocabulary. For instance, one could talk about ‘soft rights’: rights given to some robots on account of their participation in the social life. These rights would not be as ‘hard’ as for example human rights given the lower degree of moral consideration¹⁸ and given their social-relational basis. However, to use the terms ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ would suggest that the standard approach to moral status is the best one and/or provides epistemic certainty, two assumptions which I have questioned in this paper. So we might want to create an altogether different vocabulary.

Third, this approach can also be applied to animals and vice versa. We can learn from analogies. First, we might apply the ‘hard’ rights/’soft’ rights vocabulary. We could grant ‘soft’ rights to some animals that participate in the social life. However, if we take this justification seriously we can also try to go beyond the language of rights altogether and adopt an approach that is more radically social-relational. Consider meat production in industrial societies. Instead of asking first what kind of animal a pig is, we must study and evaluate relations between humans and pigs within meat production systems and within industrial society and compare this with other human-animal relations such as human-pet relations. This allows us to understand and question our ideas about moral consideration of animals. Similarly, we must study and evaluate moral consideration of social robots as different from consideration of industrial robots not on account of their intelligence or other features (what kind of robot it is), but on account of the human-robot and other relations within a larger social ecology. In this way we can critically reflect on our current views of moral consideration.

Fourth, this approach can also be applied to moral consideration of humans. Consider the concept of human rights. Of course there have been well-known moderately relational objections to, for instance, human rights, such as the feminist or Marxist critique.¹⁹ In practice, a focus on rights sometimes obscures structural (power) issues (related economic and gender differences) and other reasons why in spite of agreement on the moral-legal concept of human rights there is still much human suffering due to injustice. One could also make a utilitarian argument for alleviating human suffering that is not based on the idea of human rights. One might also employ the capability approach to clarify why human rights do not necessarily empower people to live their lives in dignity.²⁰ However, existing (Western) criticisms share a justificatory basis in ontological features of humans. Marxists, utilitarians, and neo-Aristotelians have views of ‘human nature’ that are not relational or not radically relational. They still assume a human essence that stands apart from the non-human world. As said before, for a more radically relational view one has to learn from natural ecology or perhaps non-Western worldviews if it were possible to purify them from modern-nationalist influences (e.g. ancient East Asian philosophies). These views resist and sometimes do not even understand the concept of human rights since it is so much linked up with dominant individualist and/or essentialist, non-relational Western worldviews.²¹ Thus, if we want to rethink moral consideration of humans and related moral and political concepts such as human rights, we need to engage with different kinds of social ontologies and make explicit our position. We cannot ‘do ethics’ without occupying ourselves with these wider philosophical issues and practical problems.

Finally, note that those who are unwilling to depart from the familiar, non-relational approach to moral consideration could of course try to combine the two approaches. For instance, Warren (1997) has developed a multi-criteria view of moral status: moral status depends on relational and non-relational properties. However, apart from the fact that her account applies only to living things—a limitation that can be overcome—her account of relational criteria is not systematic. It calls for attention to social relations (which it shares with ethics of care and feminist ethics), but unlike the framework sketched here, it stops there and suggests that its turn to relations has no fundamental consequences for the non-relational account. Warren’s account does too little to avoid the impression that we can have relational and non-relational criteria side by side without further problems, that we can simply add relational criteria. However, the issue of moral consideration cannot be dealt with by accumulating criteria: multiple criteria as such are acceptable, but there are strong tensions between a more relational approach and a more individual-ontological approach. A combination or ‘synthesis’ seems difficult since both approaches are connected to different views about the social. Instead Warren’s view seems to suggest that we can (and should) avoid choosing one of these moral-social directions, that we can have it all. It asks us to use multiple criteria in order to ‘represent all the relevant considerations’ (Warren 1997, p. 177) but fails to pay sufficient attention to tensions between the ‘criteria’ in terms of their social ontologies. Moreover, her use of the language of ‘properties’ (of the entity), which is common to most existing approaches, tends to deny the nature and potential of the ‘paradigm shift’ offered by a relational approach. Can we speak of ‘properties’ at all once we adopt a relational approach? On the one hand, it seems to me that within a radically relational ontology, relational properties do not exist since one can no longer make sense of the idea of a ‘property’, something that belongs to an entity. One is not conscious in the way one owns a house or a car. What appears to belong to an entity is always open to change and makes only sense in relation to that entity. On the other hand, given the importance of appearance, one could still speak of properties as long as it is understood that we mean properties-as-they-appear-to-us within a social-relational, social-ecological context.