Aristotle and Sartre on Eros and Love-Robots

1 Introduction

We live in an era in which emotional isolation keeps increasing, and yet love is necessary for human closeness and well-being.^[1] On the one hand, the growing feeling of isolation seems to be linked to the increase in the use of technology. Conversely, some try to use technology as a solution to the human search for love. After trying social media, dating apps, virtual digital partners, and other inventions that the internet has brought, more recent projects include attempts to develop love-robots.^[2] Will these projects succeed? In this article, we turn to two preeminent and widely influential moral thinkers that allow us to offer a plausible answer to this question, namely Aristotle (384–322 BC) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). First, we address romantic love (eros) in Aristotle, drawing especially on his considerations of love (philia) in the Nicomachean Ethics. We assume that the two terms are connected, emphasizing the reciprocity of both a deep emotional passion and a sexual desire, thus implying the union of two human beings with their intrinsic capacities for feeling and developing love. We will then study eros in Sartre. Although some researchers argue that there is no love for Sartre as “hell is others,”^[3] we argue that he also emphasized reciprocity in relationships as a genuine eros,^[4] similarly to Aristotle, thus would reject the use of a technological artifact in the attainment of love. Finally, we will turn to some contemporary authors, particularly Sue Johnson, a British clinical psychologist developing Attachment Theory, and Shannon Vallor, an American philosopher developing a virtue-ethics approach to technology. We draw on their work to expand upon some principles concerning technology and eros that we find in Aristotle and Sartre.

Before turning our attention to the main topic of our article, let us briefly clarify the basic terms, namely, “love” and “sex,” that we will be using.

First, love: there are different senses in which we speak of “love.” We say, “I love chocolate,” “I love my cat,” “I love my Teddy Bear,” or “I love God.” Clearly, there are different attitudes, relations, and emotions involved in the expression of these mental states. Since Antiquity and in various cultures as well, there have been various attempts to distinguish them.^[5] In this article, we will assume love in the sense of romantic love, or ἀντέρως (anteros). Etymologically ἔρως (eros) comes from ἐρᾶσθαι (erãsthai) in the sense of “to desire, to love,” i.e., no reciprocity is involved in its meaning. In Plato’s Phaedrus (255d) the term anteros is used for the reciprocal eros, namely “love for love” or “counterlove.” In Greek mythology, Anteros is the god of requited love, a son of Aphrodite and Ares, and hence a brother of Eros. This type of love is typically limited only to persons or things considered persons (which might include pets or spiritual beings, according to the beliefs of some). Love, both as eros and as anteros, is a “combination of passion and intimacy.”^[6] It comes in degrees and could even become an obsession, as many well-known literary works describe. For instance, Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) illustrates:

I had been madly in love with her. Why do people fall in love? How strange it is that in the whole world you can see only one creature, have in your mind only one thought, in your heart only one desire, and on your lips only one name – a name which constantly rises like water from a spring, up to the lips from the depths of the soul, a name which you say over and over again, which you constantly murmur wherever you go, just as though it were the words of a prayer.^[7]

Dorothy Tennov (1928–2007), an American psychologist, introduced the term “limerence” for love in this sense.^[8] We prefer the more traditional term of “eros” with its classical and contemporary connotations, although, as we shall see later, we also shift its meaning by linking it to friendship (φιλία) and emphasizing reciprocity.^[9] Thus, when we speak of love and love-robots we do not consider other types or senses of love often distinguished, such as agape (ἀγάπη, charity), storge (στοργή, taking care of), or ludus (lūdus, playful flirting).^[10] These types of love rely on characteristics for which love-robots may be perhaps trained or programmed. Love-robots may selflessly care for their owners, respond as close friends, flirt, provide a sense of safety and comfort, and/or do anything for which anyone may wish.^[11]

Second, we need to state the role of sex in our conception of eros. Erotic love involves sexuality, at least potentially. However, it is not reducible to it.^[12] Hence, we prefer to speak of love-robots rather than sex-robots.^[13] At the level of our species, human sexuality is unique from the point of view of evolutionary biology and it has a number of unusual features.^[14] At an individual level, however, it is malleable to such an extreme that we find various forms of objectophilias (sexual attraction to inanimate objects), such as agalmatophilia (dolls and statues), hierophilia (religious objects), mechanophilia (vehicles), pictophilia (i.e., pornography), etc.^[15] Some people take their desires so seriously that they insist on being “married” to objects such as a briefcase, car, or the Eiffel Tower. We do not deal with these cases of clearly non-human artifacts to which individual people are sexually attracted. We take sex-robots in this sense of malleable sexuality as an unsurprising phenomenon in a contemporary society permeated by technology. Sex-robots are and will certainly be welcomed by many and we don’t see a reason why the demand for them will not increase as the prices of private sex-robots will become more affordable and robot brothels more widespread.^[16]

Having briefly elucidated the terms of our inquiry, we now formulate our central question, which we consider the most difficult and challenging: Can robots – sophisticated artifacts that are potentially, if not currently, indistinguishable from real people – become true love companions capable of sharing eros?

2 Aristotle: Virtue Ethics and Sensuality in the Contemporary World

Aristotle emphasizes that friendship or relationship (φιλíα, philia) is based on self-love.^[17] It is a complete relationship and “an empathetic bond between a virtuous person and his ‘second self’.”^[18] Examples of Aristotle’s philia include not only young lovers (1156b2), but also lifelong friends (1156b12), parents and children (1158b20), or fellow soldiers (1159b28), and even cities with one another (1157a26).^[19] Hence, if we want to speak of romantic love (eros) in Aristotle, we need to take it as a special and higher type of friendship or relationship (philia) between two individuals, achieved through a balance of passions and virtues, with a sexual aspect being involved but without being primary. It is based on desires but also the virtues of temperance and justice, requiring two individuals who are capable of experiencing desires and developing virtues. Furthermore, it is through others that we come to love ourselves. By benefiting others, we ourselves act virtuously, which contributes to our self-improvement. This benefit lies in the virtuousness of the actions themselves, aiding in the perfection of one’s character. “The excellent person awards more of the fine to himself. In this way, then, we must be self-lovers.”^[20]

However, as Vallor and many others highlight, in Aristotle’s account of philia, there is also an emphasis on reciprocity. That is, the self develops a friendship with an other self, who seeks to develop a friendship with an other self too, and by his own will. This reciprocity seems to motivate the human being to develop virtues together with others: “as I contemplate the virtues of my beloved friend, I am also able to see a reflection of my own excellence… our virtues have largely developed in tandem by performing noble activities together.”^[21] Although there is some self-love in friendship, Aristotle rejects the view that we need friends only for their usefulness to our personal interests. Hence, he stresses the social nature of the human being, as they naturally look for interactions with fellow humans.^[22] Moreover, the virtues that lead to an excellent life, when reciprocally acknowledged, allow us to develop “intimacy, deep affection, trust, loyalty” which are fundamental values not only for friendship but for love.^[23] This interaction seems only possible between natural entities, as opposed to artifacts, since we cannot share such values with the latter. Rather, in the sense of human-made crafts, artifacts would mirror our own values and not contribute to the development of our selves and neither a relationship with an other self.^[24]

The view that Aristotle’s eros is not disconnected from philia may be surprising to some. We are not the only readers of Aristotle to think so, however. For instance, Sihvola argues, this connection is “more deeply passionate, more intense and exclusive, more connected to vulnerability” than most studies on Aristotle so far acknowledged.^[25] He points out that in the Prior Analytics of Aristotle, where he uses the term eros to designate love, there is the claim of the primacy of affection over sexual intercourse. This makes it the real “goal” of eros to which sexual intercourse is subordinated. Although it is unclear whether this is only an example used to demonstrate Aristotle’s logic or is a part of his doctrine,^[26] it seems to support textually our interpretation of Aristotle’s eros that coheres also with his Nicomachean Ethics. It also emphasizes a distinction between animal and rational soul: according to the Prior Analytics, eros is composed of a desire for sexual pleasures (the passions) and of a desire for deep human affection (a part of well-being or flourishment, eudemonia, a good that is beyond immediate pleasures and requires socializing). It highlights the human tension between natural impulses and the need for a higher human flourishing through the development of virtues, especially in developing friendship. Hence, there is another, more passionate emotional bonding found in Aristotle’s philosophy, deeper than philia as such, although presupposing it, that corresponds to the term eros. Moreover, it is understood as involving the sexual dimension of loving attraction which, together with deep emotional passion, constitutes love in the relevant sense. Eros, as we have already pointed out above, is the stereotypical passionate love, a “deep passion and a sort of madness inspired by a fascination with one’s partner,”^[27] linked with reciprocity and sexual desire. Although Aristotle emphasizes the relation of friendship (philia) based on the development of the virtues, he does acknowledge the importance of physicality and the associated desires in a way that recalls the concept of eros. ^[28]

At the beginning of The Metaphysics, Aristotle emphasizes the human “esteem for the senses …for their own sake.”^[29] Human beings and other living organisms (animalia) are born with those senses. In spite of great technological advances, we have not yet been able to fully reconstruct those senses in artificial systems. The fact that we can appreciate the sensory data as such is one of the gifts of being human. In Aristotle’s ethics, natural appetites, falling under the animal part of the human soul, should be controlled by our virtues to achieve the ultimate good. Sensuality, in this context, would fall under the virtue of temperance. That is, Aristotle acknowledges the necessity of sensuality as a human disposition: it cannot be erased as follows from the constitution of human beings; it is also necessary for our survival. Consequently, to our senses, pleasure is something that comes along with human life experience: “pleasure grows up with all of us from infancy on. That is why it is so hard to rub out this feeling… We also estimate actions [as well as feelings] … by pleasure and pain.”^[30] Aristotle highlights how pleasure is a natural inclination of human beings, stating that “it is more difficult to fight pleasure than to fight spirit.”^[31] However, it can become unhealthy for the individual or pernicious for society if it is uncontrolled. Thus, the senses as implied in sensuality are necessary for the achievement of eudemonia, the good to which human beings are naturally oriented. It is, indeed, through those very senses that we enjoy contact in relationships.

Interestingly, aside from the social value of building relations with one another, Aristotle also stresses the importance of tactile perception: “without touch, none of the other senses are present.”^[32] Because of the primariness of touch, by extension, he emphasizes desire: “to those living things which have touch, desire belongs as well.”^[33] Desire for Aristotle is an impulse oriented toward an external object, relevant to one’s needs. Regarding sensuality, it aims at pleasure, that is, the enjoyment of something by sensory perception. This emphasis on touch and desire brings us back to the interaction with others, because “touch is perception of other sensibles co-incidentally.”^[34] Aristotle does not argue that pleasure is the greatest good, rather, it is something lower and limited. The reason is that pleasure is not a motion toward the activity of happiness but only an immediate good. The enjoyment of the right things, that is, aiming at human flourishing, is a matter of education and virtues. A correct life in that sense gives access to more worthy pleasures. Immediate pleasure can only participate in happiness with the correct use of our faculties, and developing socially is of a greater moral value than the immediate fulfilment of earthly desires.^[35] Nevertheless, human relationships are emphasized as one of the most valuable parts of human well-being:

Having friends seems to be the greatest external good… For no one would choose to have all [other] goods and yet be alone, since a human being is a political [animal], tending by nature to live together with others… The happy person needs friends.^[36]

Now, given this Aristotelian view of love, may we consider what follows from it for love-robots? Is it likely that the new technologies, such as love-robots, will help human beings to temper their natural impulses, or will they reinforce the influence of sensual appetites? We have already suggested our answer to this question in Section 1 and we shall return to it in Section 4 where we argue that there is no eros between robots and humans, and no genuine reciprocity.

We may put this point also in terms of care and friendship, to which, as we have seen, eros is related. Vallor argues for an understanding of care as a cardinal virtue, pertaining to the value of friendship that is defended in the Nicomachean Ethics; this becomes, in our contemporary context, a “technomoral” virtue. She defines care as an attitude and an “activity of personally meeting another’s need” that if appropriately used can participate in “personal excellence.”^[37] In this sense, it is important that human beings practice care to develop correct control of their impulses, which may become vices if uncontrolled.^[38] If love-robots replace the Other in the parts of social interactions that require diligence, patience, care, and the like, it seems likely that human beings will become more inclined to feel pleasure directly and discard efforts that lead to durable happiness, such as adopting a caring attitude in relationships. Thus, the position of care ethicists is that “we become moral selves largely by teaching ourselves to actively respond and meet the needs of others.”^[39] That is, our moral development depends on the existence of an Other, and the subjective participation to their well-being by care. In a world in which we replace the Other in our interactions with an artificial system, according to care ethicists, we do not – and neither can we – flourish as moral beings.

As we shall see, Sartre also underscores the understanding of the Other in relation to the self and human relations as involving reciprocity, touch, and desire. He emphasizes that interaction with the Other is necessary for the development of both the self and the Other’s self.

3 Sartre: Social Existentialism, Sensuality, and Technology

Sartre’s existentialism has some elements of continuity with Aristotle’s ethics in that it emphasizes the works of self-perfectionism to live “a good life.” It also accentuates the value of authenticity and freedom as well as the importance of a morally organized social order. Authenticity, for Sartre, means that a good decision is the decision an individual takes for himself, by his own free will, rather than for others or to comply with social conventions. It is, as Marjorie Grene (1910–2009) called it, an “existential virtue.” It is also a social virtue, since when “I reveal myself to myself in authenticity, … I raise others along with myself toward the authentic.”^[40] We recognize here the solidarity already stressed by Aristotle regarding the task of self-perfectionism.

At the basis of his ontology, Sartre distinguishes between the being in-itself (l’être en-soi) and the being for-itself (l’être pour-soi). A being in-itself lacks self-awareness but has a defined nature, while a being for-itself has consciousness and the ability to change: its aim is not clearly defined. Thus “for the For-itself, to be is to choose its way of being on the ground of the absolute contingency of its being-there.”^[41] A for-itself cannot become an in-itself, it is “condemned to be free;”^[42] though the for-itself is in relation with the in-itself. ^[43]

Ontological relations between human beings, for Sartre, are a matter of object-ness, that is, appropriation: “my concrete relations with the Other… are wholly governed by my attitudes with respect to the object which I am for the Other.”^[44] What an individual is aiming at in relation with the Other is to capture it with its transcendence, to capture a trait of the Other which by virtue of itself escapes possession. Thus “I am – at the very root of my being – the project of assimilating and making an object of the Other.”^[45] But this acknowledgement of the Other as an object of my thoughts is what gives it its existence: we exist through the perception of the Other. Thus “I am the proof of the Other.”^[46]

We will now look further at the elements of eros in Sartre’s philosophy. There are three elements constitutive of love emerging from Sartre’s ontology that rejoin Aristotle’s philosophy: passionate feelings, sexual desire, and the reciprocity of those feelings.^[47]

Thus, one of the main aspects of eros is its emotional nature, highlighting its character of “deep passion.” An emotion, for Sartre, is a magical phenomenon, in the sense of something mysterious. It is “not the apprehension of an exciting object in an unchanged world; rather since it corresponds to a global modification of consciousness and of its relations to the world, emotion expresses itself by means of a radical alteration of the world.”^[48] Furthermore, the emotional bond with the Other in a relationship begins with a physical interaction.^[49]

As part of the expression of eros, it is necessary to consider desire, particularly sexual desire. The world only becomes the ground for our desires due to the presence of the Other; for Sartre, we cannot extract ourselves from this condition of living in the world of others, but this is also this condition that makes the world “the ground for explicit relations with the Other.”^[50] Moreover, there is also an authentic sexual desire that “involves a sensual or fleshy reciprocity between agent and Other.”^[51] In Being and Nothingness, Sartre develops his understanding of romantic exchanges with the concept of the caresse. The caresse seems to be the way by which we appropriate the Other, it is the kinaesthetic expression of desire.^[52] He writes,

if caresses were only a stroking or brushing of the surface, there could be no relation between them and the powerful desire which they claim to fulfil; they would remain on the surface like looks and could not appropriate the Other for me… In caressing the Other I cause her flesh to be born beneath my caress, under my fingers. The caress is the ensemble of those rituals which incarnate the Other.^[53]

Furthermore, by the caresse the flesh of the Other is born not only for myself, but genuinely for himself or herself. Sartre follows Aristotle on the idea that for self-perfectionism, an individual depends on others: “your friend, since he is another yourself, supplies what your own efforts cannot supply.”^[54] Though love is not only self-oriented; it is truly altruistic in that it contributes to the development of the self of an Other.

Finally, Sartre’s view of human relationships implies reciprocity: “We are by no means dealing with unilateral relations with an object-in-itself, but with reciprocal and moving relations.”^[55] There is a reciprocity of creation of the self in our relationship with the other: I am creating the Other by possessing him/her, but I am also possessed by the Other, which causes my existence. “The Other holds a secret – the secret of what I am.”^[56] The reciprocity also lies in the fact that in the caresse, not only does the Other’s flesh come to exist through the interaction with my flesh, but I also cause my flesh to “be born for me in so far as it is for the Other flesh causing her to be born as flesh… And so possession truly appears as a double reciprocal incarnation.”^[57] Thus “my incarnation is not only the preliminary condition of the appearance of the Other as flesh to my eyes. My goal is to cause him to be incarnated as flesh in his own eyes.”^[58] For Sartre, this is especially because I come to exist by this appropriation by the Other that I desire it – it is, in this sense, a self-oriented love. But this appropriation is not an enslavement, it must preserve freedom. Human desire in relationships is not to possess a being detached from the freedom which makes its essence, it wants the Other as Other, that is, in its freedom. Sartre wrote

If Tristan and Isolde fall madly in love because of a love potion, they are less interesting. The total enslavement of the beloved kills the love of the lover. The end is surpassed; if the beloved is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone. Thus, the lover does not desire to possess the beloved as one possesses a thing; he demands a special type of appropriation. He wants to possess a freedom as freedom.^[59]

The contradiction of love is that we wish certainty on the reciprocity of our feelings, thus, we wish to annihilate the freedom of the other, and yet we need to preserve it for love to be love. “The lover demands a pledge yet is irritated by the pledge. He wants to be loved by a freedom but demands that this freedom as freedom should no longer be free.”^[60] If I come to possess the Other, it is only “the coat, the outer shell which I possess.”^[61] The self of the Other as it is a free for-itself will always escape being possessed, as it cannot become an in-itself without losing its inherent properties.

Now, what would Sartre, given his views, think of contemporary technology and its impact on the reciprocal relation between the self and the Other? As several authors point out, a conversational AI, which is one of the components of love-robots, is like a mirror to its users.^[62] In a limited way, it knows us, and we can be through them, though it does not understand the meaning of knowing – if it is selfless, can it possess the Other? Isn’t it curious, anyway, that one would want to appropriate the Other as “love”? As we have seen there is a reciprocity in the caresse that implies two beings with a self, because it is about the acknowledgment of oneself as flesh and not only about satisfying desires. This, however, only makes sense of beings for-themselves, because of their indeterminate nature arising from their inherent freedom. This means that a machine created to a definite end, a being in-itself, cannot enrol in this exchange. It is made for and limited to its function; it has no freedom in a Sartrian sense. But for Sartre, the reason why I would need other fellow human beings, even if I were excellent and self-sufficient in the Aristotelian-ethicist way, is particularly because of desire.

Desire requires living flesh, with its contingency, not an instrumental body designed to a specific end. Without living flesh, there is no desire, and thus no reciprocity of desire; “I desire to be revealed as flesh by means of and for another flesh.”^[63] This impulse is at the root of the consciousness of the self which allows me and the Other to exist as flesh.^[64] Thus, we have seen that like Aristotle, Sartre emphasizes the genuine sensations of touch as part of what motivates human beings to interact with others, but not only; physical interactions position the self in the world and, by this, give existence to it:

In my desiring perception I discover something like a flesh of objects… the warmth of air, the breath of the wind, the rays of sunshine, etc.; all are present to me in a certain way, as posited upon me without distance and revealing my flesh by means of their flesh. From this point of view desire is not only the clogging of a consciousness by its facticity; it is correlatively the ensnarement of a body by the world.^[65]

Surely, the “warmth of the air” and alike sensations do not mean the same for machines as for human beings. We do not perceive sensations in terms of calculations, but as genuine feelings, linked to the “magic” of emotions. Nor does the condition of belonging to the world mean the same; a machine does not need to find itself and its position as a being within the world since it does not create itself by its existence, but is created with an essence toward a specific aim, even if this aim is something as unclear as to fulfil the needs of human existence. Machines, it seems at least in their current designs, cannot have such a “primitive” means as desire, nor would they need it for a natural end. Human beings, in desire, aim at enchantment.^[66] This is the emotional part of love, one that is worth experiencing for itself. But the realm of the for-itself, of beings as of feelings, is yet foreign to any machine whatsoever. Sartre’s social existentialism seems to collapse in such technological creations as love-robots, because the machines replacing the Other are not capable of reciprocating one’s desires, nor of having freedom and embody it in the courageous virtue of authenticity.

We will now look at some recent studies on the development of love-robot to further explore Aristotle’s and Sartre’s philosophies in light of the advances of our century.

4 Aristotle and Sartre Against Love-Robots

Attempts have been made to create robots that can fulfil the sexual needs of human beings, by reproducing human basic physiology. These attempts can astonish by their realism, in that it is possible to create an impression of warm, human skin and create robots with an entire fake human body, that will simulate sexual functions.^[67] They can be designed with an artificial intelligence programmed to approximate expressions of emotional responses and have a personality.^[68] We claim, however, that these sex-robots are still far from being love-robots and hence unable to fulfil an eros type of sexual needs. This we take to follow from principles of Aristotle’s and Sartre’s ethics to which many are committed. True, artificial robots may have the ability to fulfil some subjective human social needs to a certain extent; for example, chatbots can be fun and entertaining to have conversations with. However, to fulfil the human needs of an eros, we argue, love-robots still need to be able to provide a genuine reciprocity of emotional passion. They are, however, deprived of such feelings and attitudes. Despite their distinction, one reproach that is made to sex-robots may address the concept of love-robots as well: the use of both kinds of devices seems to disregard consent, thus, the choice to reciprocate.^[69]

Sue Johnson, in her work Love sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships, points out that human beings naturally seek social contact and a comforting connection, pertaining Aristotle’s view of human beings as a “political animal.”^[70] Thus, building a relationship seems to rely on the knowledge that the other is both able and willing to share such a connection. Similarly, Jeffrey Bennett argues in response to Levy’s optimism about the future of love-robots that romantic love is a phenomenon inbuilt in human beings by their biology, rejoining Aristotle’s distinction between biological entities and artifacts;^[71] the longing for love is what makes us want emotional attachment and sensuality.^[72] Johnson highlights this emotional dependency of human beings as a strength rather than a constraint, in contrast with Sartre’s view that the self emerges from and is imprisoned in the look of the Other.^[73] In any case, “love” does not seem to exist as a computable concept, but only as a drive, and reproducing what it leads to will not mean reproducing love itself. Robots may imitate attachment and sensuality, but if these are not driven by a genuine need to feel love, they will not reproduce love itself. In addition, from a cultural point of view at this time, romantic love seems to exist as a consequence of human decisions concerning their intimacy and exclusivity; without an Other, there is no decision upon the Other, only control of an empty entity reflecting the self.

Another contemporary philosopher, Henrik Skaug Sætra, an expert on social robots, also points out the central importance of love in human life; not having love often being considered a “tragedy.” He distinguishes sex and love in that the one relies on physiological needs, and the other on a deeper need for connection, that is, a search for an intimate sense of belonging with an Other.^[74] Thus, love-robots are intended to be more than sex-machines; they must fulfil an existential need rather than a mere physiological one.^[75]

Now, given what we have argued for in this article, can eros exist between love-robots and humans seeking love? Following Aristotle’s Metaphysics, love-robots (at least as for the current technology) are not genuine persons. Hence, those who claim to experience genuine love with a robot are either mistaken or may not speak of genuine love but rather a type of sensuality (a love substitute), because current love-robots are mainly designed to mimic sexual practices and have a basic conversation with their user. In this sense, “love-robots” (as they are present on the market in 2024, self-learning sex-robots) rather seem to be a new means for self-indulgence on bodily pleasures. As Aristotle puts it, this leads to intemperance, which is thus opposed to the development of the virtues.^[76]

Saetra argues that there is currently little debate regarding the selflessness of robots – as well as their lack of inner sense of morality. In the context of relationships, robots can only adopt a “servile and fully one-sided attitude.”^[77] Thus, the capacities of robots regarding the meanings of being-love, or reciprocal love as in Aristotle’s and Sartre’s philosophies, is yet limited to the borders of our imagination. Saetra adds, “If practical and one-sided deficiency love becomes the ideal kind of love, then only robots will, in the end, be potential partners.”^[78]

However, Saetra also points out that just like we do not have access to the Other’s inner self, we do not have access to that of a robot – since it does not have one – and thus, from this point of view, one may consider love with robots.^[79] Furthermore, as the social psychologist Sherry Turkle points out, it is natural for human beings to react positively to certain primitive clues, such as eye contact and basic mutual signalling, that allow us to accept an entity “as an Other because as animals that’s how we are hard-wired – to recognize other creatures out there,” thus highlighting the possibility to acknowledge an artificial entity as an Other capable of human interactions.^[80] This view, however, only seems to consider the subject’s immediate satisfaction in interacting with a robot and not the long-term elements that allow individuals to build love, such as desire, passion, and reciprocity. Nevertheless, because love is something established by and phenomenologically observed in human experience, the ontological selflessness of robots does not impact love; however, human interactions with them, as love-robots become the object of the experience of love, may show a modification of how human beings experience and conceptualize love. In Turkle’s words, “The prospect of loving, or being loved by, a machine changes what love can be.”^[81]

While technology has an obvious impact on functional life in that it helps us in our daily tasks and increases the capacities of all kinds of work environments, it has also been shown to impact human relationships. Moreover, culture – we suggest including its technological devices – “has been found to have an impact on people’s conceptions of love and the way they feel, think, and behave in romantic relationships,” and one of the tensions about love is the tendency of culture in imposing “control” or exclusivity.^[82] Mark Coeckelbergh, a Belgian philosopher of technology, even argued that interacting with robots changes our emotional beings.^[83] With the use of dating apps for example, love is becoming a superficial agency. That is, instead of making the effort to create long-term, deep connections, and shared feelings, people tend to look for immediate pleasure without getting to know each other, or maintaining a relationship in the long term. Some studies link this new trend with a decrease in marriage and intentions to have a lover.^[84] But another stage in this technological evolution is the increasing attempts to make artificial mates, that is, love-robots. In fact, it seems likely that “succeeding” in making functional love-robots would mean changing the meaning of romantic love to one that is achievable with love-robots rather than creating machines capable of eros. As Saetra argues, love would come to be viewed as a performance rather than a deep reciprocal connection.^[85]

While some thinkers argue that such a view is efficient in describing love,^[86] it loses the profound meaning that we pointed out in the philosophies of Aristotle and Sartre. The view of our thinkers is closer to that of the philosopher Michael Hauskeller: “we love our partners not only because of what they do but why they do what they do.”^[87] That is, the intentionality of an authentic self is what we are looking for in our relationships, not a mere performance. In addition, we love others as individuals, not primarily as instances of a type. Eros-love takes individuals as irreplaceable in a similar way as Frankfurt argued for in his conception of love. In this sense, it would never occur to anyone in a romantic love relationship to replace his or her partner with a “substitute.”^[88] And while we are able to get a new sex-robot under warranty if it gets broken, how could we ever make such a warranty contract for romantic lovers?

The concept of robots designed for human sex seems to challenge love as comprising a real attachment bond because it enhances the confusion between eros and sexual desire, disregarding the need for an emotional connection with an Other; as Johnson remarks, one of the recent scientific findings is that enjoying sex does not lead to secure love. Rather, a secure attachment leads to the enjoyment of sex and long-lasting relationships.^[89] On this point, science follows Aristotle who argued already for the primacy of attachment over sexual desire: “The affectionate desire is supposed to lead to intercourse under normal conditions.”^[90] Love-robots might seem ideal partners because we can decide about their personality and appearance in order to make them “pleasing” to their users. However, the conception of love that they imply seems contrary to the Sartrian understanding of authentic human beings and their relations because there is no authenticity in love-robots: all their decisions are calculated according to their knowledge concerning the human needs that they are programmed to fulfil. It also seems incompatible with Aristotle’s ethics, because virtue ethics promotes the view of love as bearing what is wrong and doing what is right together, while love-robots would allow us to erase what bothers us and do what is right alone and not in friendship.

The difficulties we must go through in building a relationship and as we go through life, though, seem to be what makes relationships enduring. Following interactions with “perfect” beings, which do not challenge us in genuine ways might change human traits of character – such as patience – and drive us to an intolerance of human vulnerability and of difference in people, and lead the concept of unconditional love to collapse.^[91] Virtue, true virtue, seeks to be shared with an Other. And as we noted, for Johnson, human emotional dependency should not be regarded as a pathology, it is a strength, because it helps us to evolve in the world by maintaining our mental and physiological health; relying on machines for our love-needs might make us feel more lonely and anxious in the end, because robots are “implicitly promising an emotional connection they can never deliver.”^[92] For Johnson, as for Aristotle and Sartre, becoming “the best” that one can be, is only achievable through a deep connection with an Other.^[93]

Similarly, Saetra points out that love-robots challenge the perception of love as a commitment and as underlying “deeply passionate feelings.”^[94] While we can imagine the ability of love-robots to fulfil human romantic needs if we understand them as a sort of friendship (storge), intense emotions constituting an eros type of love seem yet beyond their reach.^[95] Though passionate love is commonly associated with sex, which machines can be programmed for, they lack the emotional part of eros, experienced as “a sort of madness inspired by a fascination with one’s partner.”^[96] A human being may have such feelings for an artificial being, however, there will be no reciprocity; a robot is yet unable to feel any emotion, though they may imitate their visible effects based on calculation.^[97] The view of Sartre, though, is that under the activity of an Other intentionally expressing desire, one comes to exist as flesh, thus if there is no reciprocity in such passion with an artificial being, there is no real completion of the self through one’s relationship with the Other. Similarly, Bennett points out that we have the capacity to make “one another feel felt,” emphasizing reciprocity and emotional connection in the meaning of romantic love.^[98]

However, love-robots allow individuals to fill in the cultural need of control and exclusivity in romantic relationships. It highlights the belief that love can happen quickly and on demand. Moreover, human beings can develop emotional attachments toward even simpler technological artifacts than love-robots able to sustain a relationship in a human way, yet this kind of attachment seems to deviate from eros to other types of love. And, if those artifacts fulfil the needs for control and exclusivity, and avoid people the need to be patient, do they help us become virtuous human beings? It seems that control and exclusivity lose their meaning if love is only one-sided; and patience, though not a cardinal virtue itself, reflects a self-control of natural impulses such as the sexual drive. Like Aristotle and Sartre, Vallor also emphasizes the “friction” of human relationships: if we could be stimulated and pleased on demand, our humanity would be “diminished,” in that we would not evolve by being confronted with diversity and learn to respect the Other as Other. Furthermore, she points out that genuine love and care are values that are built, thus not only implying a human innate sense of empathy but also requiring time and effort. In a relationship with an artificially “perfect” mate, in contrast, there is neither empathy nor time and effort implied to build a relationship – it is a given. A world without those capacities and their flexibility, though, is a world that “very few of us would want to live in, and that none of us should want.”^[99] Similarly, Yao argues that desire can only exist if one remains in an unsatisfied state; were we to get exactly what we think that we want in our desires, those same desires would vanish.^[100]

Yet, what about relationships between non-consenting selfless robots and humans seeking eros? Vallor makes similar existential reproaches to robots in the context of care-professions which rejoin our arguments about human eros and the limitations of love-robots. For instance, she points out that although a caring virtue can have for its object a being that is unable to feel physiologically or emotionally, “virtuous care… must still be motivated by a general feeling for the importance of loving service to others.”^[101] Care can be defined as an attitude and an activity “of personally meeting another’s need.” According to this definition, we could imagine a machine able to perform care; though as Vallor remarks “caring for people well is not easy.”^[102] Those claims suggest a difference in degree, not in kind, between humans and robots. Furthermore, Vallor stresses the importance of the practice of caring in highlighting reciprocity: “reciprocity holds human relations together and allows other kinds of goods to flow across those connections.” Moreover, for Johnson, humans are naturally empathetic, not selfish; our innate inclination is socially oriented, it is to feel “with and for” others.^[103] There is an underlying trust in the shared human intention and capability to care, in an availability as Gabriel Marcel called it.^[104] And while a loss of trust in this human capacity explains the efforts in developing care-robots, Vallor points out that those who have lost their trust in human care are “profoundly damaged beings.”^[105] Vallor, like Sartre, emphasizes concrete human relationships that involve individuals concerned with the goods of the practice of caring itself, from which morality emerges, and not only the beneficial effect of caring.^[106] Just as care-bots degrade the “own ideal ethical self” of the caregivers,^[107] love-robots may have a degrading effect on human beings.

5 Conclusion

In conclusion, the three aspects of eros that we have considered – deep passion, sexual desire, and reciprocity – remain far beyond the capabilities of current machines. Eros-love is not only inaccessible to machines themselves, but it is also impossible for humans to genuinely experience it with an artificial system that lacks the capacity for passion, desire, and reciprocity. Attempts to develop love-robots may diminish natural human care for and expressions of love toward one another.

However, the imperfection or incompleteness of such attempts to develop love-robots does not necessarily negate the potential legitimacy and usefulness of sex-robots (with which they should not be confused). Human excellence, in spite of Aristotle’s deep insights, remains elusive and no human can be deemed to be the perfect lover. Perhaps, “perfect love” should be understood as “perfectly human,” where engaging in a romantic relationship requires recognizing the Other as a distinct individual with integrity and an authentic self, not merely a compliant reflection of our own often whimsical desires. To follow Sartre’s view, failing to acknowledge the Other as an independent and free being would ultimately be self-undermining.