How to Use Virtue Ethics for Thinking About the Moral Standing of Social Robots: A Relational Interpretation in Terms of Practices, Habits, and Performance

TL;DR: The paper concludes that this approach does not only give a better account of what happens when people behave “badly” towards social robots, but also suggests a more comprehensive virtue ethics of technology that is fully relational, performance-oriented, and able to not only acknowledges but also theorize the temporal and bodily dimension of virtue.

Abstract: Social robots are designed to facilitate interaction with humans through “social” behavior. As literature in the field of human–robot interaction shows, this sometimes leads to “bad” behavior towards the robot or “abuse” of the robot. Virtue ethics offers a helpful way to capture the intuition that although nobody is harmed when a robot is “mistreated”, there is still something wrong with this kind of behavior: it damages the moral character of the person engaging in that behavior, especially when it is habitual. However, one of the limitations of current applications of virtue ethics to robots and technology is its focus on the individual and individual behavior and insufficient attention to temporal and bodily aspects of virtue. After positioning its project in relation to the work of Shannon Vallor and Robert Sparrow, the present paper explores what it would mean to interpret and apply virtue ethics in a more social and relational way and a way that takes into account the link between virtue and the body. In particular, it proposes (1) to use the notion of practice as a way to conceptualize how the individual behavior, the virtue of the person, and the technology in question are related to their wider social-practical context and history, and (2) to use the notions of habit and performance conceptualize the incorporation and performance of virtue. This involves use of the work of MacIntyre, but revised by drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of habit in order to highlight the temporal, embodiment, and performative aspect of virtue. The paper then shows what this means for thinking about the moral standing of social robots, for example for the ethics of sex robots and for evaluating abusive behaviors such as kicking robots. The paper concludes that this approach does not only give us a better account of what happens when people behave “badly” towards social robots, but also suggests a more comprehensive virtue ethics of technology that is fully relational, performance-oriented, and able to not only acknowledges but also theorize the temporal and bodily dimension of virtue.