3,155 research outputs found
Artificial morality: Making of the artificial moral agents
Abstract:
Artificial Morality is a new, emerging interdisciplinary field that centres
around the idea of creating artificial moral agents, or AMAs, by implementing moral
competence in artificial systems. AMAs are ought to be autonomous agents capable of
socially correct judgements and ethically functional behaviour. This request for moral
machines comes from the changes in everyday practice, where artificial systems are being
frequently used in a variety of situations from home help and elderly care purposes to
banking and court algorithms. It is therefore important to create reliable and responsible
machines based on the same ethical principles that society demands from people. New
challenges in creating such agents appear. There are philosophical questions about a
machine’s potential to be an agent, or mora
l agent, in the first place. Then comes the
problem of social acceptance of such machines, regardless of their theoretic agency
status. As a result of efforts to resolve this problem, there are insinuations of needed
additional psychological (emotional and cogn
itive) competence in cold moral machines.
What makes this endeavour of developing AMAs even harder is the complexity of the
technical, engineering aspect of their creation. Implementation approaches such as top-
down, bottom-up and hybrid approach aim to find the best way of developing fully
moral agents, but they encounter their own problems throughout this effort
Designing Virtuous Sex Robots
We propose that virtue ethics can be used to address ethical issues central to discussions about sex robots. In particular, we argue virtue ethics is well equipped to focus on the implications of sex robots for human moral character. Our evaluation develops in four steps. First, we present virtue ethics as a suitable framework for the evaluation of human–robot relationships. Second, we show the advantages of our virtue ethical account of sex robots by comparing it to current instrumentalist approaches, showing how the former better captures the reciprocal interaction between robots and their users. Third, we examine how a virtue ethical analysis of intimate human–robot relationships could inspire the design of robots that support the cultivation of virtues. We suggest that a sex robot which is equipped with a consent-module could support the cultivation of compassion when used in supervised, therapeutic scenarios. Fourth, we discuss the ethical implications of our analysis for user autonomy and responsibility
Moral Competence and Moral Orientation in Robots
Two major strategies (the top-down and bottom-up strategies) are currently discussed in robot ethics for moral integration. I will argue that both strategies are not sufficient. Instead, I agree with Bertram F. Malle and Matthias Scheutz that robots need to be equipped with moral competence if we don’t want them to be a potential risk in society, causing harm, social problems or conflicts. However, I claim that we should not define moral competence merely as a result of different “elements” or “components” we can randomly change. My suggestion is to follow Georg Lind’s dual aspect dual layer theory of moral self that provides a broader perspective and another vocabulary for the discussion in robot ethics. According to Lind, moral competence is only one aspect of moral behavior that we cannot separate from its second aspect: moral orientation. As a result, the thesis of this paper is that integrating morality into robots has to include moral orientation and moral competence
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