Moral competence in social robots

By Bertram F. Malle, Matthias Scheutz. 2014

95 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose that any robots that collaborate with, look after, or help humans-in short, social robots-must have moral competence. But what does moral competence consist of? We offer a framework for moral competence that attempts to be comprehensive in capturing capacities that make humans morally competent and that therefore represent candidates for a morally competent robot. We posit that human moral competence consists of four broad components: (1) A system of norms and the language and concepts needed to communicate about these norms; (2) moral cognition and affect; (3) moral decision making and action; and (4) moral communication. We sketch what we know and don't know about these four elements of moral competence in humans and, for each component, ask how we could equip an artificial agent with these capacities.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Safety Research

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Bertram F. Malle
2. Jamy J. Li
3. Tim Miller
4. Joshua Knobe
5. James R. Beebe
6. Wesley Buckwalter

In Safety Research

1. Bertram F. Malle
2. Wendy Ju
3. Jamy J. Li

Citations in the corpus

• From Trolley to Autonomous Vehicle: Perceptions of Responsibility and Moral Norms in Traffic Accidents with Self-Driving Cars (2016, background): “Whether such capacities include explicit moral decision-making is as yet unclear because it is not an easy feat to code morals into machines [16, 17].”