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Robots, humanoid and otherwise, are being created with the underlying motivation in many cases that they will either replace or complement activities performed by humans. It has been many years since robots were starting to be designed to take over “dull, dirty, or dangerous” tasks (e.g., Singer 2009). Over time, roboticists and others within computing communities have extended their ambitions to create technology that seeks to emulate more complex ranges of human-like behavior, potentially including the ability to participate in complicated conversations. Regardless of how sophisticated its functionality is, a robot should arguably be encoded with ethical decision-making parameters, especially if it is going to interact with or could potentially endanger a human being. Yet of course determining the nature and specification of such parameters raises many longstanding and difficult philosophical questions. 

Our research team has been investigating methods for enabling robots to behave ethically while interacting with human beings. Our approach relies on two main sources of data for determining what counts as “ethical” behavior. The first are the views of average adults, which we refer to “folk morality”, and the second are the views of ethics experts. Yet the enterprise of identifying what should ground a robot’s decisions about ethical matters raises many fundamental metaethical questions. Here, we focus on one main metaethical question: would reason dedicate that it is more justifiable to base a robot’s decisions on folk morality or the guidance of ethics experts? The goal of this presentation is to highlight some of the arguments for and against each respective point of view, and the implications such arguments might have for the endeavor to encode ethical decision-making processes into robots. 

This paper examines the metaethical dimensions of the computing community’s efforts to program ethical decision- making abilities into robots. Arguments for and against that endeavor are outlined along with brief recommendations for the human-robot interaction realm. 

This paper describes current progress on developing an ethical architecture for robots that are designed to follow human ethical decision-making processes. We surveyed both regular adults (folks) and ethics experts (experts) on what they consider to be ethical behavior in two specific scenarios: pill-sorting with an older adult and game playing with a child. A key goal of the surveys is to better understand human ethical decision-making. In the first survey, folk responses were based on the subject’s ethical choices (“folk morality”); in the second survey, expert responses were based on the expert’s application of different formal ethical frameworks to each scenario. We observed that most of the formal ethical frameworks we included in the survey (Utilitarianism, Kantian Ethics, Ethics of Care and Virtue Ethics) and “folk morality” were conservative toward deception in the high-risk task with an older adult when both the adult and the child had significant performance deficiencies. 

This paper describes ongoing research for a three-year NSF-funded project on ethical architectures for robots; specifically striving to understand how robots can reconcile differing outcomes produced by alternative ethical frameworks (e.g., Kantianism, Utilitarianism, and Ross’s moral duties). The process of determining the correct action is mediated by context and the moral emotional state of the robot. This paper describes the motivation, background, and approach to the project.