Can Robots Have Souls?

There's a game called Overwatch which features many characters experiencing a futuristic world in which robots have become common and have started causing interesting social problems. These robots (called "omnics" in the game) were deeply involved in an event called the "omnic crisis," a war between the robots and the humans. The humans won, but several robots survived, including a handful who possess some of the best of human qualities. For instance, Zenyatta is an omnic who seeks spiritual enlightenment. He is part of a group of omnics who feel that they have had an awakening and believe that they possess "the essence of a soul" (Overwatch Wiki, Zenyatta). Zenyatta seeks to heal the rift between humans and omnics by interacting with humans, by proving that he's not as "inhuman" as some people believe robots are, and in some cases, by serving as a spiritual leader for some humans and helping them find inner peace. As a playable character, Zenyatta says several proverbial lines that inspired my blog post on proverbs two weeks ago.

The idea of a robot monk is intriguing, but the idea of a robot having a soul is somewhat troubling. I think of souls as a thing that humans have that sets them apart from other things. I'm not even sure if animals have souls. I'm sure that non-living things, like rocks, don't have souls. But could they?

In a video on artificial intelligence, Hank Green discusses the possibility of robots having souls, saying "We have no idea what the process of ensoulment might look like, but suffice it to say, if God could zap a soul into a fertilized egg or a newborn baby, there's no real reason to suppose He couldn't zap one into [a robot] as well" (Artificial Intelligence & Personhood).

I have no good answer to that. The title character of Disney's Pocahontas claimed that she knew that "every rock and tree and creature has a life, has a spirit, has a name," and I've heard that everything on earth was created spiritually before it was created physically. I suppose it's possible for non-human, and even non-living, things to possess souls, though that has some rather troubling implications, and I wonder how God would sort that all out.

However, the question of whether or not robots can have souls may be irrelevant anyway, at least to us. If humankind ever makes robots that have souls, then we should probably treat them the same way we'd treat any other person, but shouldn't we try to be kind anyway? In a short video made by the people who made Overwatch, a group of human punks shown beating and bullying a robot, whom they claim is "just a bucket of bolts." Whether that robot had a soul or not, the behavior of those punks said a lot about the state of their souls.

Asking whether or not a robot or an animal has a soul is a lot like asking whether a goblet is made out of glass or plastic. The only practical reason for me to have asked that question is to know how rough I could afford to be with them while washing them. If I washed them all gently, as though they were all made out of glass, then it wouldn't matter what the goblets were made of. Similarly, if we treat everything kindly, then it won't matter which things truly have souls and feelings and which things don't. If you're kind to a machine that turns out not to have a real soul or real emotions, then you practised kindness for no other reason than to practice kindness, but practising kindness is reason enough.

I don't know whether rocks or animals have souls, and I don't know whether robots will or even could ever have souls of their own. But whether robots ever become real people or not, I'm going to try to treat them like people. In fact, I just might try to treat everything the way I would treat a person, just in case. Kindness matters, but I don't think it matters whether the things we are kind (or unkind) to actually have souls or feelings or not.