Chewing It Over: Revealing Tensions And New Directions For More-Than-Human Relational Ethics Through Speculative Design

Paper Title

Chewing It Over: Revealing Tensions And New Directions For More-Than-Human Relational Ethics Through Speculative Design

Publication Info

• Topic area: Relational ethics in more-than-human design and HCI.
• Keywords: Relational ethics, more-than-human design, speculative design, corporal compassion, transcorporeality, felt ethics, dining theatre, multispecies coexistence, moral hesitation, posthumanist HCI.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Traditional ethical frameworks in design and HCI are often anthropocentric, prescriptive, and fail to address the relational complexities of multispecies interactions. These frameworks can foreclose moral ambiguity and hinder relational engagement with more-than-human entities.
• Significance: Addressing these limitations is crucial for fostering sustainability, expanding moral imagination, and creating ethical frameworks that account for shared vulnerabilities across species.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work in relational ethics, transcorporeality, and soma design has explored embodied, situated, and interdependent ethical paradigms. However, these approaches often remain human-centered and lack explicit engagement with multispecies contexts. This paper builds on these foundations by introducing corporal compassion as a lens to extend ethical consideration to microorganisms.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A speculative dining-theatre intervention designed to provoke reflection on shared vulnerabilities and ethical dilemmas involving fictional human-microbial hybrid cells.
• Novelty:
  1. Application of Acampora’s concept of corporal compassion to microorganisms.
  2. Development of a speculative dining-theatre method to elicit embodied moral deliberation.
  3. Identification of tensions between moral openness and closure in engaging with more-than-human ethics.
  4. Proposal of counter-perspectives rooted in relational ethics to reinterpret traditional ethical frameworks.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Participants engaged in a dining-theatre setup featuring fictional human-microbial hybrid cells.
  • Menu items represented hybrid organisms with narratives of suffering and exploitation.
  • Participants assigned moral weights to food items, recorded analogies, and shared their decision-making processes.
  • The intervention used sensory and embodied experiences (e.g., ingestion) to provoke reflection on ethical assumptions and relational engagement.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Participants demonstrated varied levels of moral openness, ranging from hypothetical empathy to somatic engagement with microbial suffering.
  • Familiar ethical frameworks (e.g., risk assessment, consent, capitalist transactions, causal distancing) were often used to stabilize moral uncertainties, leading to moral closure.
  • Analogies drawn by participants revealed connections to everyday consumption habits, interpersonal behaviors, and political contexts.
• Advantage over baselines: The intervention surfaced limitations in conventional ethical reasoning and highlighted the potential of embodied, relational approaches to expand moral imagination in multispecies contexts.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Conducted during a science festival with 47 participants across seven sessions.
  • Data collected through tasting notes, audio recordings, and participant discussions.
  • Analysis focused on thematic coding of moral weights, analogies, and participant responses.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The speculative nature of the intervention limits direct applicability to real-world scenarios.
  • Future work could explore practical implementations of relational ethics in biodesign and more-than-human HCI, as well as methods to support sustained moral hesitation.

Summary

This paper introduces corporal compassion as a framework for extending ethical consideration to microorganisms, using a speculative dining-theatre intervention featuring fictional human-microbial hybrids. The study reveals tensions between moral openness and closure, with participants often reverting to familiar ethical frameworks that foreclose relational engagement. By analyzing participant responses, the paper highlights the limitations of traditional ethical reasoning and proposes counter-perspectives rooted in relational ethics to reinterpret these frameworks. The findings contribute to more-than-human HCI by demonstrating how embodied encounters can provoke moral experimentation and expand multispecies ethical imagination. The authors call for design research to embrace moral hesitation and ambiguity as generative sites for posthuman knowledge creation.