Taking the Intentional Stance Toward Robot Ethics
نویسنده
چکیده
I wish to defend the thesis that robot ethics is a legitimate, interesting, and important field of philosophical and scientific research. I believe it is a coherent possibility that one day robots will be good ethical decision-makers at least in limited situations and act ethically on the basis of their ethical understanding. Put another way, such envisioned future robots will not only act according to ethical principles but act from them. This subject goes by various names such as "robot ethics," "machine ethics," or "computational ethics." I am not committed to any particular term, but I will here use "robot ethics" as it suggests artificial agency. I do not exclude the possibility of a computer serving as an ethical advisor as part of robot ethics, and I include both software and hardware agents as candidates for robots. Kinds of Ethical Robots Agents, including artificial agents, can be understood as ethical in several ways. I distinguish among at least four kinds of ethical agents (Moor 2006). In the weakest sense ethical impact agents are simply agents whose actions have ethical consequences whether intended or not. Potentially any robot could be an ethical impact agent to the extent that its actions cause harms or benefits to
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