From Warranty Voids to Uprising Advocacy: Human Action and the Perceived Moral Patiency of Social Robots

Abstract

Moral status can be understood along two dimensions: moral agency [capacities to be and do good (or bad)] and moral patiency (extents to which entities are objects of moral concern), where the latter especially has implications for how humans accept or reject machine agents into human social spheres. As there is currently limited understanding of how people innately understand and imagine the moral patiency of social robots, this study inductively explores key themes in how robots may be subject to humans’ (im)moral action across 12 valenced foundations in the moral matrix: care/harm, fairness/unfairness, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, purity/degradation, liberty/oppression. Findings indicate that people can imagine clear dynamics by which anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and mechanomorphic robots may benefit and suffer at the hands of humans (e.g., affirmations of personhood, compromising bodily integrity, veneration as gods, corruption by physical or information interventions). Patterns across the matrix are interpreted to suggest that moral patiency may be a function of whether people diminish or uphold the ontological boundary between humans and machines, though even moral upholdings bare notes of utilitarianism.

Legacies and last words: Exploring expressed experiences of robot death.

“…This could be a figurative understanding since humans are limited in their abilities to understanding things outside the bounds of human experience (Bogost, 2012) and since life and death are easily apprehended metaphors for technological continuance and loss (Lynch & Matthews, 2018). However, it could also be experienced more literally, as people may cultivate deep attachments to machines (White & Katsuno, 2021) and see them as meaningful moral patients (Banks, 2021b). The experience of RFC as meaningful death of a machine person could be taken up as evidence of the experience of the machine's constructed aliveness-a loss of attachment to someone (Tomlinson, 1999).…”

“…The extent to which people may anthropomorphize the robot (and so see death more in line with intentional/moral stances) may depend on individuals' propensities for humanizing objects or extending that tendency to robots (Lee et al, 2011) and on varied attitudes and beliefs about the potentials of technology (Martínez-Co ´rcoles et al, 2017). Other individual differences of import may be trait empathy given links to moral expansiveness to include nonhumans (Crimston et al, 2016) and people variably see robots as potential moral patients (one whose well-being matters and for which humans are responsible; Banks, 2021b). Just as some humans may be predisposed, some machine features are more or less likely to invoke anthropomorphizing reactions since people may interpret animacy through kinetics or properties that specify aliveness and intentionality (see Bartneck et al, 2009): smooth motions, intuitive or reasonable behaviors, physicality, personal narrative, adaptation, growth, apparent self-interestedness, and even machine-native (i.e., nonhuman/nonanimal) gesturing (Parviainen et al, 2019;Tomlinson, 1999;Vasylkiv et al, 2020).…”

Supplemental Material for Legacies and last words: Exploring expressed experiences of robot death.

“…This could be a figurative understanding since humans are limited in their abilities to understanding things outside the bounds of human experience (Bogost, 2012) and since life and death are easily apprehended metaphors for technological continuance and loss (Lynch & Matthews, 2018). However, it could also be experienced more literally, as people may cultivate deep attachments to machines (White & Katsuno, 2021) and see them as meaningful moral patients (Banks, 2021b). The experience of RFC as meaningful death of a machine person could be taken up as evidence of the experience of the machine's constructed aliveness-a loss of attachment to someone (Tomlinson, 1999).…”

“…The extent to which people may anthropomorphize the robot (and so see death more in line with intentional/moral stances) may depend on individuals' propensities for humanizing objects or extending that tendency to robots (Lee et al, 2011) and on varied attitudes and beliefs about the potentials of technology (Martínez-Co ´rcoles et al, 2017). Other individual differences of import may be trait empathy given links to moral expansiveness to include nonhumans (Crimston et al, 2016) and people variably see robots as potential moral patients (one whose well-being matters and for which humans are responsible; Banks, 2021b). Just as some humans may be predisposed, some machine features are more or less likely to invoke anthropomorphizing reactions since people may interpret animacy through kinetics or properties that specify aliveness and intentionality (see Bartneck et al, 2009): smooth motions, intuitive or reasonable behaviors, physicality, personal narrative, adaptation, growth, apparent self-interestedness, and even machine-native (i.e., nonhuman/nonanimal) gesturing (Parviainen et al, 2019;Tomlinson, 1999;Vasylkiv et al, 2020).…”