Should Robots Kill? Moral Judgments for Actions of Artificial Cognitive Agents

Moral dilemmas are used to study the situations in which there is a conflict between two moral rules: e.g. is it permissible to kill one person in order to save more people. In standard moral dilemmas the protagonist is a human. However, the recent progress in robotics leads to the question of how artificial cognitive agents should act in situations involving moral dilemmas. Here, we study moral judgments when the protagonist in the dilemma is an artificial cognitive agent – a humanoid robot or an automated system – and compare them to moral judgments for the same action taken by a human agent. Participants are asked to choose the appropriate protagonist action, to evaluate the rightness and the moral permissibility of the utilitarian action, and the blameworthiness of the agent. We also investigate the role of the instrumentality of the inflicted harm. The main results are that participants rate the utilitarian actions of a humanoid robot or of an automated system as more morally permissible than the same actions of a human. The act of killing undertaken by a humanoid robot is rated as less blameworthy than the action done by a human or by an automated system. The results are interpreted and discussed in terms of responsibility and intentionality as characteristics of moral agency.