It is critical for designers of language-capable robots to enable some degree of moral competence in those robots. This is especially critical at this point in history due to the current research climate, in which much natural language generation research focuses on language modeling techniques whose general approach may be categorized as “fabrication by imitation” (the titular mechanical “bull”), which is especially unsuitable in robotic contexts. Furthermore, it is critical for robot designers seeking to enable moral competence to consider previously under-explored moral frameworks that place greater emphasis than traditional Western frameworks on care, equality, and social justice, as the current sociopolitical climate has seen a rise of movements such as libertarian capitalism that have undermined those societal goals. In this paper we examine one alternate framework for the design of morally competent robots, Confucian ethics, and explore how designers may use this framework to enable morally sensitive human-robot communication through three distinct perspectives: (1) How should a robot reason? (2) What should a robot say? and (3) How should a robot act?
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Role-based Morality, Ethical Pluralism, and Morally Capable Robots1
Dominant approaches to designing morally capable robots have been mainly based on rule-based ethical frameworks such as deontology and
consequentialism. These approaches have encountered both philosophical and computational limitations. They often struggle to accommodate remarkably diverse, unstable, and complex contexts of human-robot interaction. Roboticists and philosophers have recently been exploring underrepresented ethical traditions such as virtuous, role-based, and relational ethical frameworks for designing morally capable robots. This paper employs the lens of ethical pluralism to examine the notion of role-based morality in the global context and discuss how such cross-cultural analysis of role ethics can inform the design of morally competent robots. In doing so, it first provides a concise introduction to ethical pluralism and how it has been employed as a method to interpret issues in computer and information ethics. Second, it reviews specific schools of thought in Western ethics
that derive morality from role-based obligations. Third, it presents a more recent effort in Confucianism to reconceptualize Confucian ethics as a role-based ethic. This paper then compares the shared norms and irreducible differences between Western and Eastern approaches to role ethics. Finally, it discusses how such examination of pluralist views of role ethics across cultures can be conducive to the design of morally capable robots sensitive to
diverse value systems in the global context.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1909847
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10265897
- Editor(s):
- Ess, Charles
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of contemporary Eastern Asia
- ISSN:
- 2383-9449
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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