Artificial companions

Author(s)

Mark Coeckelbergh

Abstract

Under what conditions can robots become companions and what are the ethical issues that might arise in human-robot companionship relations? I argue that the possibility and future of robots as companions depends (among other things) on the robot's capacity to be a recipient of human empathy, and that one necessary condition for this to happen is that the robot mirrors human vulnerabilities. For the purpose of these arguments, I make a distinction between empathy-as-cognition and empathy-as-feeling, connecting the latter to the moral sentiment tradition and its concept of "fellow feeling." Furthermore, I sympathise with the intuition that vulnerability mirroring raises the ethical issue of deception. However, given the importance of appearance in social relations, problems with the concept of deception, and contemporary technologies that question the artificial-natural distinction, we cannot easily justify the underlying assumptions of the deception objection. If we want to hold on to them, we need convincing answers to these problems.

Organisation(s)

Department of Philosophy

External organisation(s)

University of Twente

Journal

Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology

Volume

4

DOI

https://doi.org/10.2202/1941-6008.1126

Publication date

12-2010

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

603113 Philosophy, 603122 Philosophy of technology

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Computer Science Applications, Law, Sociology and Political Science

Portal url

https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/artificial-companions(95146446-41a6-4662-94a7-f54af979cdc7).html