IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2011 - 75

another instance, considering the need to account for values that are part of a collective conscience, the so-called
rights ethics sees human rights to be the most relevant elements in common for a system of cultural and moral pluralism and as being reasonably deemed to be the final
manifestation of universal ethics.
One of the challenges to traditional ethical theories by
some thinkers regarded the limitation of moral considerations to the problems of humans and their relationship in
human society, regardless of other living organisms and
environment. Therefore, ethical theories and the new applied
ethical theories, in particular, were called upon to include
nonhuman entities in their analysis (animal ethics, environmental ethics, and planetary ethics known as the Gaia
theory) as well as human products (bioculture, computer
ethics, and roboethics).
The various applied ethical theories are, in turn, connected and intertwined with other disciplines, including
law, sociology (descriptive ethics), economics, and various
scientific fields. One of the central themes of applied ethics
is the concept of responsibility, which is a moral notion.
Legal responsibility determines the rules of the relevant
prescriptive ethics, meaning the group of commands and
prohibitions adopted by a society or group and that also
defines professional ethics. For the purpose of this article
(to analyze the human-robot relationship), we shall consider the two main meanings of the term responsibility:
1) the analysis of the identity of the agent of the cause of
certain actions and their effects (utilitarianism or consequentialism or teleologism)
2) an expression of motivations that leads an agent to act
in a certain way (deontological ethics or Kantian ethics),
according to which the individual assesses the consequences of his or her actions.
In the last century, we know that the questions "What
authority and what set of moral rules am I obliged to be
accountable to? State law? God?" forced many answers
(utilitarian or deontological) to a crisis point. Often, the
moral response of the individual as well as the moral evolution of our society have led to an opposition to the responsibility toward the nation, church, or traditional roles of
social institutions (see Max Weber's ethics of intentions or
ethics of individual conscience).
Some serious events related to World War II changed
the notion of responsibility and differentiation of roles
(i.e., engineers deal with engineering, doctors with medicine, soldiers obey orders from superiors, etc.) and also
some famous legal cases, e.g., the Adolph Eichmann trial,
during which he defended himself by stating that he was
obeying the orders under his administrative responsibilities and that he did not decide on, nor was he aware, of the
entire project of Jewish extermination or the debate that
ensued after Hiroshima and Nagasaki 1945.
Furthermore, there are different cases in which our personal moral clashes with those adopted and imposed by the
society we live in and whose law we live under. Such is the

case, for example, of the death penalty (which is in force in
various states in the United States, although contested by
internal currents), animal rights, abortion, or euthanasia. In
these cases, the implicit moral philosophy in state laws does
not coincide with the feelings of many groups of the relevant
societies, which leads to this sort of conflict.
Therefore, we observe that, in contemporary societies,
the notion of responsibility is not limited to the moral consideration of actions of the agent or cause and deals with
the needed conformity of the action with a group of duties
(therefore, the analysis of consequences is less decisive). In
today's society, just the elements of complexity and technological ruling determines the aspect known as heterogenesis of ends, according to which our actions may have
consequences that are extremely difficult to estimate, which
may even be opposite to our intentions. According to Morin's ecology of action [11], once the action departs from the
individual, it lives a life of its own, and combines itself with
the environmental conditions (social models, actions, and
reactions of other agents), and the final result is beyond the
agent's predictive abilities.
Faced with this vacancy in the attribution of individual
responsibility, some researchers attempted to identify collective shared responsibilities, were it to be impossible or vain
to identify an individual responsibility. In the case of scientific research, science and technology studies (S&TS) expert
Rene von Schomberg proposes to adopt an assessment system based on foresight and knowledge (foresight and knowledge assessment). The author sustains that, because the
definition of responsibility is considerably more arduous
to define in scientific fields, due to the unintentional consequences, uncertainty, or ignorance of results, instead of
identifying the ethical responsibilities post hoc, it is necessary to establish the ethics of the overlap of knowledge
between different areas beforehand (synergy: scientists, politicians, etc.), because the quality of knowledge shall determine the ethical value of the applications that will follow.
At the same time, one must constantly ensure that
maximum precision of predictions to identify both the
wholesomeness of research and relevant applications as
well as the potential ethical problems [12].
Other authors have emphasized the need to avoid the
overlap between ethical problems and technical solutions:
among the latter, the expert of computer ethics, Abbe Mowshowitz [22] states that
the seemingly eternal social problems are real enough,
but to look for their cause in technique or autonomous technology is both mistaken and harmful. We
should not blame technology for human failures. (..)
Autonomous technology contributes to the belief in
technological determinism, i.e., reinforces belief in
the inability of people to make significant choices in
their lives. It directs attention away from wielders of
power to systems of reified collectivities. The law is
smarter than the social sciences-it defines the corporation, for example, as a fictional person for purposes
MARCH 2011

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