If you kick a robotic dog, is it wrong?

"If we replace that, I think we're impoverishing our children. These relationships [with robotic pets] aren't going to be fully moral. They'll be partially moral, which is not as good as a real relationship with a real animal whose needs teach children that their own desires don't always come first."

Despite their attachments, most Aibo owners don't seem to grant their pets much moral standing, according to sociological research done by Kahn and his colleague, Prof. Batya Friedman.

Fewer than 10 percent of owners who openly shared their feelings in an online chatroom indicated a belief that their pet had rights or could be blamed for misdoings. Owners always seem to remember, whether on a conscious or subconscious level, that their pets - beloved as they are - remain machines.

Nevertheless, some are more comfortable than others with treating them as mere machinery.

For Peter Danielson, director of the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia, the danger lies not in regarding mechanical pets too lowly but rather too highly. They are, after all, not much different from handheld computers.

"If someone puts a [robotic] kitten in a microwave, it's not horrible. It's foolish, but it's not morally forbidden," Dr. Danielson says.

"It seems to me there's a whole ethics of fiction and toys that we're thinking through. Are you telling me I ought to treat something that looks like a kitten, but is actually a piece of plastic, better than I treat a pig, which is actually a sentient and intelligent being? You're building a taboo system that gets further and further from the actual value. And every time you do that, you lose your moral authority with your technologically inclined kid who says, 'That's stupid.' "

Yet for those who ascribe emotions to a robotic pet, and who learn nonetheless that they can be neglected or abused without consequence, a dangerous habit with larger implications could be in the works, according to James Hughes, a sociologist at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and secretary of the World Transhumanist Association.

"The concern is that treating an 'animal' as a lesser being could bleed over to treating certain humans as lesser beings," Dr. Hughes says.

Consider a human being in a vegetative state with no greater self-awareness or deep desires than a robotic pet, he says.

If Aibo deserves no respect because it lacks self-awareness and deep desires, he asks, then on what basis would a vegetative human being deserve any measure of respect?

Even if a robot is "abused," it may not "hurt" the object, but the act of destruction shows a lack of respect for property.

"We have to become more sophisticated in the distinctions we make in order to ensure we make them responsibly," Hughes says.

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