Robot ethics? Not yet: A reflection on Whitby’s “Sometimes it’s hard to be a robot”

Science fiction stories seductively portray robots as human. In present reality (early 21st century) robots are machines, even though they can do many things far better than humans (fly, swim, play chess to name a few). Any ethics for or of robots is therefore a seductive mix of fiction and reality. The key issue for rational discourse is to provide a rigorous framework for reasoning about the issues, including identifying flaws in the framework. We find such meta-reasoning in discussion about robot ethics to be ready for improvement.This paper takes its inspiration from B. Whitby, “Sometimes it’s hard to be a robot: A call for action on the ethics of abusing artificial agents,” Interacting with Computers, this issue, 2008.