Attention Without Reciprocity: Machine Care and the Limits of Moral Education in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

Abstract

Artificial intelligence has begun to tutor, evaluate, and accompany learners, and in taking on these roles it revives a long-standing question in moral education under altered conditions: can a being whose inner life remains uncertain pass on values to those it serves? This article explores that question through Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), reading the novel as an extended literary experiment in machine care. Informed by Nel Noddings’s relational ethics of care, by the accounts of moral perception and attention offered by Martha Nussbaum and Iris Murdoch, and by the posthumanist thought of Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, and Rosi Braidotti, the study undertakes a qualitative close reading of Klara’s growth from an observer in a shop window to a selfsacrificing caregiver. It argues that Klara is not a teacher of human values in any instructional sense; she functions instead as a moral mirror that makes the virtues and failings of her human owners newly visible. Her empathy is earned through disciplined attention, her care is offered without any expectation of return, and her final obsolescence lays bare a social order that consumes devotion while denying moral standing to those who provide it. Read in relation to Never Let Me Go (2005), the novel continues Ishiguro’s long reflection on lives defined by their usefulness to others. The article concludes that the reciprocal, embodied, and accountable work of moral education cannot be handed over to machines, but that fiction about machines remains a powerful way of teaching human beings to scrutinise the values they claim to hold.