Robot rights? Towards a social-relational justification of moral consideration

Towards a Theory of Online Social Rights

Legitimacy, defined as fairness plus public good, is a proposed necessary online and physical community requirement,. As Fukuyama notes, legitimate societies tend to prosper, while others ignore legitimacy at their peril. Online communities are social-technical systems (STS), built upon social requirements as well as technical ones like bandwidth. As technical problems are increasingly solved, ...

Autonomous Movement Predicts Children's Moral Regard and Prosocial Behavior Towards a Social Robot Dog

Young children are remarkably prosocial towards humans. However, it is less clear what drives children’s prosociality towards non-human others. Here we explore the possibility that children’s moral regard stems from their understanding of others as autonomous beings. To investigate this possibility, we asked five and seven-yearold children to interact with a robot dog that appeared to be either...

Animal Rights Consideration is a Necessity in Conducting an Experiment

Towards a Human Rights Culture in Social Work Education

A human rights perspective must be embedded in the institutions, organisations or agencies where social work students find themselves. This paper will focus on one particular strategy that could be helpful to the process of solidifying a commitment to human rights for our students. Using a pedagogical tool from a school of social work in the USA originally developed to combat the social injusti...

Towards a Justification the Principle of Coordination

Different variations of a Principle of Coordination are used in a number of different research traditions. Roughly speaking, one version of the Principle says that if there is a unique Pareto-efficient outcome in a game, then players will choose their part of that outcome. In this paper I will investigate the foundations of the Principle and see to what extent the Principle follows from some ax...