In a princessipality beyond the mountains lived a fabulously wealthy and powerful princess. Naturally, she was very bored. One day she commanded her craftswomen to build her an amazingly complicated machine, so ingenious that she would never ever be bored again. It was filled with innumerable tiny wooden levers that subtly altered their position every time it learnt a new trick, so that it would never perform the same trick twice in exactly the same way. It was powered by thousands of tightly coiled springs, so many that in the end it took three years to wind them all: but after that, the machine was ready to run for a whole year without tiring; and finally, it was ready.
The Queen (did I mention she had had to wait nearly a lifetime for her machine to be built?) commanded her entire court to withdraw. Hesitantly, she placed a bejewelled finger on the small round concealed button, and gently pushed. The machine responded with a slowly spreading whirr that became like the beating of a million butterfly wings as if it was truly coming to life. It moved almost imperceptibly and the Queen felt her heart fill to the point of bursting until – with a rapturous sigh – she dropped dead on the spot.
We cannot speak of machine rights without resorting to fiction. All rights – human rights, animal rights – begin with a fiction. But each fiction is born of a necessity.
In the novel “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel, the boy Pi adrift in a lifeboat, having lost almost everything, has no remaining use for rights – until the author introduces a tiger as his travelling companion. A tiger in normal circumstances would quickly overpower and devour the boy but, by luck and quickwittedness, Pi is able to subdue his unexpected fellow passenger and assert his own rights. They each concede the other territory and a shared life becomes possible. The exact rights they have will turn on the precise circumstances of their co-existence, a shifting balance of power whereby each attempt at action renegotiates the rules. There isn’t an absolute space on the boat that belongs by rights to Pi: there is only a truce, a temporary fiction which he must constantly maintain, renew and reshape as necessary. Within the reduced horizons of the lifeboat, Pi and the tiger have established specific rights for themselves that may not exist nor have any meaning outside it.
Can inanimate objects have rights? Could one conceive of something as unlikely as a street lamp enjoying any rights? It would be absurd to claim for it a human right to fresh water, for instance, but you could argue it had a “positive right” to electricity. If in theory it lacks formal rights, in practice – from moment to moment – it may also embody some very basic “negative rights”. In the same way that Pi has to give ground to the tiger, I cannot simply walk in a straight line along the pavement if a lamp post happens to be in my path. I have to negotiate a route round it, just as I would for another person standing in the street. However, if I kicked it or insulted it, it wouldn’t be an act of violence or mental injury on its concrete person, if anything it would cause a public disturbance. And if, rather than walk round, I bulldozed it out of the way, in addition to a fine to the authorities, I would have to pay compensation to its owner. Any rights attaching to the street lamp would arise out of its place in the human world. As a rare example of past culture, a gas lamp might enjoy protected status – including perhaps a real right to its own gas supply where one wouldn’t otherwise be needed – except that, of course, we would be the ones enjoying its yellow glow.
In the queendom beyond the mountains, the craftswomen organized torchlit search parties for the escaped mechanical toy. How they wished they had thought ahead and not made it respond only to the touch of the departed Queen! How they wished they had not thought ahead and ever worried that it should accidentally become lost! It had seemed such a brilliant idea to allow it to rewind its springs, in the unlikely event it strayed twenty miles beyond the borders of the castle and into the impenetrable forest, to recharge itself by consuming meat. Above all, they wished they hadn’t made it quite such a realistic tiger.
As this is my story, I can now invade Pi’s story while he is asleep on the lifeboat, remove his sleeping tiger and replace it with the Queen’s toy. Because of the rules of fictional worlds, the replacement version is just as dangerous as its predecessor, in fact apart from a concealed switch it happens to be indistinguishable in looks and behaviour. When he wakes up, Pi will have the same set of rights (albeit always a work in progress) he went to bed with. What rights should we now award our mechanical tiger? An impartial observer would continue to score them as before: their respective rights arising mutually out of the circumstances.
Perhaps what we often treat as rights are not intrinsic but more of a convenient fiction, a name for the range of actions that custom affords in the presence of others and for which we are prepared to inconvenience ourselves. Are they really necessary? If there is a such a thing as an intrinsic right, then the tiger might instinctively feel the need to be part of the lived world; Pi might have more thoughtful and ambivalent feelings about his own right to be there; but the machine (unless the craftswomen’s craft far exceeds our own) has a hole where its feelings would be. Its needs are hardly its own.
Should Pi catch a glimpse of the concealed switch, the doppelgänger’s mechanical nature, what difference would it make on the lifeboat? Very little, perhaps. His danger would not have lessened as the switch would not work for him. One thing that might lessen, however, is the sense that he is surviving the perils of the open sea with another living creature. But, having lost that sense, it would be hard for him to picture instead the decades of design and labour by some foreign population that went into the fabrication of the meat-eating toy. Should he continue to live in the fiction of the moment and retain empathy with a tiger that isn’t a tiger or by force of imagination expose the distant fiction, destroy the machine and face the sea alone?
What happens next, when Pi and the tiger part company, stepping onto the shore, across the frame of the boat and into the framing story? Perhaps (continuing to rewrite the story as we go) he can no longer remember the start of the novel, but he is also as yet unaware of my substitution… if I decide to make it. We have a few minutes, back on dry land, while the tiger disappears in the opposite direction. Now if in the next scene a deputation arrives from the zoo, then it was a real tiger after all; but if from the craftswomen, he will learn for the first time how his ordeal was spent with a machine.
To what extent should he hold the two groups of people responsible for their respective tigers? Should he blame them for their beasts escaping and causing him mental suffering, or thank them for keeping him motivated to stay alive?
One difference is that the builders of the mechanical tiger could have tried not to satisfy the princess’s wishes quite so enthusiastically, so literally. The zoo would have known just as clearly the behaviour of their big cat in the wild, but the ultimate responsibility for that nature rests with God (I will defer to the novelist here). The craftswomen could have worried far more about the survival prospects of unknown strangers than those of their pet machine. There were any number of design choices they could have taken in making their anti-boredom device that would have produced a less unpredictable outcome. All that’s left to decide, then, is who to blame amongst the changing teams of craftswomen, over the forty or fifty years and countless unrecorded conversations, and in the rarefied social atmosphere of the princessipality that led them to think it was ever a good idea?
We may never know for sure and perhaps it’s the wrong question. There are many reasons to hesitate before blaming people involved in doing bad things and a better use of our time might be trying to help them avoid making the same mistakes in future. If I had to choose? I would simply say, as in the original novel, our lives do seem marginally less pointless if it turns out the tiger was real.
pabloredux 