The ethical issues of social assistive robotics: A critical literature review

Abstract

Along with its potential contributions to the practice of care, social assistive robotics raises significant ethical issues. The growing development of this technoscientific field of intelligent robotics has thus triggered a wide-spread proliferation of ethical attention towards its disruptive potential. However, the current landscape of ethical debate is fragmented and conceptually disordered, endangering ethics’ practical strength for normatively addressing these challenges. This paper presents a critical literature review of the ethical issues of social assistive robotics, which provides a comprehensive and intelligible overview of the current ethical approach to this technoscientific field. On the one hand, ethical issues have been identified, quantitatively analyzed and cate-gorized in three main thematic groups. Namely: Well-being, Care, and Justice. On the other hand –and on the basis of some significant disclosed tendencies of the current approach–, future lines of research and issues regarding the enrichment of the ethical gaze on social assistive robotics have been identified and outlined.

This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under a FPI scholarship for predoctoral contracts for the training of doctors (PRE2018-084286), and by the Spanish State Research Agency through the María de Maeztu Seal of Excellence to IRI (MDM-2016-0656).

Peer Reviewed

Postprint (published version)