ArticleScience and engineering ethics2020
Building Moral Robots: Ethical Pitfalls and Challenges.
Article in Science and engineering ethics, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Moral and perceptual conflict processing are implemented by distinct brain activation and functional connectivity patterns.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Moral diversity and the challenge of responsibility in AI-CDSS.Philosophy, ethics, and humanities in medicine : PEHM · 2026Article
- Security Aspects of Social Robots in Public Spaces: A Systematic Mapping Study.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Assistive Technologies, Robotics, Automatic Machines: Perspectives of Integration in theHealthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Evolution of Brains and Computers: The Roads Not Taken.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Ethics and Automated Systems in the Health Domain: Design and Submission of a Survey on Rehabilitation and Assistance Robotics to Collect Insiders' Opinions and Perception.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Information Security in Medical Robotics: A Survey on the Level of Training, Awareness and Use of the Physiotherapist.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- The Cybersecurity and the Care Robots: A Viewpoint on the Open Problems and the Perspectives.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Opportunities and Problems of the Consensus Conferences in theHealthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Three Risks That Caution Against a Premature Implementation of Artificial Moral Agents for Practical and Economical Use.Science and engineering ethics · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This paper examines the ethical pitfalls and challenges that non-ethicists, such as researchers and programmers in the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence and robotics, face when building moral machines. Whether ethics is "computable" depends on how programmers understand ethics in the first place and on the adequacy of their understanding of the ethical problems and methodological challenges in these fields. Researchers and programmers face at least two types of problems due to their general lack of ethical knowledge or expertise. The first type is so-called rookie mistakes, which could be addressed by providing these people with the necessary ethical knowledge. The second, more difficult methodological issue concerns areas of peer disagreement in ethics, where no easy solutions are currently available. This paper examines several existing approaches to highlight the ethical pitfalls and challenges involved. Familiarity with these and similar problems can help programmers to avoid pitfalls and build better moral machines. The paper concludes that ethical decisions regarding moral robots should be based on avoiding what is immoral (i.e. prohibiting certain immoral actions) in combination with a pluralistic ethical method of solving moral problems, rather than relying on a particular ethical approach, so as to avoid a normative bias.
Indexed as
Identifiers
30701408What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.