Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia

World Association for Triple Helix and Future Strategy Studies (세계트리플헬릭스미래전략학회)
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Role-based Morality, Ethical Pluralism, and Morally Capable Robots

  • Zhu, Qin (Department of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Colorado School of Mines) ;
  • Williams, Tom (Department of Computer Science, Colorado School of Mines) ;
  • Wen, Ruchen (Department of Computer Science, Colorado School of Mines)
  • Published : 2021.08.19
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was funded in part by National Science Foundation grant IIS-1909847.

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