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

This paper develops a Levinasian framework for addressing the challenge of human-centric discourse struggling to articulate responsibility and justice for hybrid human–robot assemblages. Against suggestions to adopt an ethical pluralism that balances multiple principles and perspectives, I argue that 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. Drawing on Derrida’s account of law and justice, Object-Oriented Ontology, and the material turn, I elaborate 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. The argument is grounded in concrete examples from healthcare robotics, autonomous vehicles, and algorithmic governance, illustrating how what I call “Problem C”, the attribution of responsibility and distributed agency in human–robot interaction, materializes in practice. To better situate this contribution in contemporary debates, 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.