A modest proposal.
There are many cases in law where in an attempt to arrive at a just decision, an appeal is made to whether or not a reasonable person would have acted in the same way in the given scenario. This is often referred to as the ‘reasonable person standard’. What level of precaution would a reasonable person have taken? How would a reasonable person have behaved in the same situation?
While the reasonable person standard can be a useful legal tool for analyzing legal situations and determining guilt/liability/etc., the reasonable person remains a legal fiction. When used in general or vague terms, there are few problems with this standard. We often find that most people agree on most major aspects of what constitutes a reasonable person. However, the reasonable person standard starts to break down when the tests and scenarios start getting more specific and start relying on more specific traits or attributes. Though we all tend to agree on general traits and trends we would like to see in our society, we quickly come to realize that there is no such thing as an average, reasonable person who we can all agree on in every way.
However, in the 21st century are privileged enough to have access to something that legal scholars up until this point haven’t even dreamt of: robots.
Through the use of robots, we could manufacture reasonable people to live among us for the first time in human history. We could design them to live in our society alongside us, and have them act as real-life test cases to be used for the reasonable persons standard. Among other people, these robots would be greatly beneficial to judges who have to make difficult rulings involving the reasonable person standard. In order to solve the problem, we would simply place the robot in an identical situation and observe what actions the robot takes.
Since we would be using robots to re-enact these scenarios, we would not have to worry about any moral or ethical consequences that might result from having to act out particularity dangerous or abhorrent situations. We could place these robots in the most dangerous or lethal situations without having to worry about their well being, because robots aren’t alive! The worst-case scenario would involve manufacturing another robot if we lost one to a re-enactment.
Furthermore, robots are cold, soulless calculating machines. This means that they would be able to re-enact the scenarios provided in great detail and without any deviation from the original scenario. This would be a huge leap forward in crime re-enactment technology, and would result in far fewer errors in judgment and jury bias than the current standard: the dramatic reenactment.
Through the use of robots, we could begin to improve our society through improving the fairness of our legal system. This would also eliminate the need for religion and other type of spiritual guidance. There would be no more reason to ask “What would Jesus do?” if you could walk up to your nearest reasonable person robot and simply ask what they would do! No more waiting for the second coming… robots are now!
