---
title: "Robot ethics"
chunk: 2/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_ethics"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:24:12.612544+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Killer robots ==
Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS), often called "killer robots", are theoretically able to target and fire without human supervision or interference. In 2014, the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) held two meetings. The first was the Meeting of Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems. This meeting was about the special mandate on LAWS and intrigued intense discussion. National delegations and many non-governmental organizations(NGOs) expressed their opinions on the matter.
Numerous NGOs and certain states such as Pakistan and Cuba are calling for a preventive prohibition of LAWS. They proposed opinions based on deontological and consequentialist reasoning. On the deontological side, certain philosophers such as Peter Asaro and Robert Sparrow, most NGOs, and the Vatican argue that granting too much rights to machine violates human dignity, and that people have the "right not to be killed by a machine". To support their standpoint, they repeatedly cite the Martens Clause.
At the end of the meeting, the most important consequentialist objection was that LAWS wouldn't be able to respect international humanitarian law (IHL), as believed by NGOs, many researchers, and several states (Pakistan, Austria, Egypt, Mexico).
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), "there is no doubt that the development and use of autonomous weapon systems in armed conflict is governed by international humanitarian law." States recognize this: those who participated in the first UN Expert Meeting in May 2014 recognized respect for IHL as an essential condition for the implementation of LAWS. With diverse predictions, certain states believe LAWS will be unable to meet this criterion, while others underline the difficulty of adjudicating at this stage without knowing the weapons' future capabilities (Japan, Australia). All insisted equally on the ex-ante verification of the systems' conformity to IHL before they are put into service, in virtue of article of the first additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions.

=== Degree of human control ===
Three classifications of the degree of human control of autonomous weapon systems were laid out by Bonnie Docherty in a 2012 Human Rights Watch report.

human-in-the-loop: a human must instigate the action of the weapon (in other words not fully autonomous)
human-on-the-loop: a human may abort an action
human-out-of-the-loop: no human action is involved

== Sex robots ==
In 2015, the Campaign Against Sex Robots (CASR) was launched to draw attention to the sexual relationship of humans with machines. The campaign claims that sex robots are potentially harmful and will contribute to inequalities in society, and that an organized approach and ethical response against the development of sex robots is necessary.
In the article Should We Campaign Against Sex Robots?, published by the MIT Press, researchers pointed some flaws on this campaign and did not support a ban on sex robots completely. Firstly, they argued that the particular claims advanced by the CASR were "unpersuasive", partly because of a lack of clarity about the campaign's aims and partly because of substantive defects in the main ethical objections put forward by campaign's founders. Secondly, they argued that it would be very difficult to endorse a general campaign against sex robots unless one embraced a highly conservative attitude towards the ethics of sex. Drawing upon the example of the campaign to stop killer robots, they thought that there were no inherently bad properties of sex robots that give rise to similarly serious levels of concern, the harm caused by sex robots being speculative and indirect. Nonetheless, the article concedes that there are legitimate concerns that can be raised about the development of sex robots.

== Law ==
With contemporary technological issues emerging as society pushes on, one topic that requires thorough thought is robot ethics concerning the law. Academics have been debating the process of how a government could go about creating legislation with robot ethics and law.
A pair of scholars that have been asking these questions are Neil M. Richards Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law as well as, William D. Smart Associate Professor of Computer Science at McKelvey School of Engineering. In their paper "How Should the Law Think About Robots?" they make four main claims concerning robot ethics and law. The groundwork of their argument lies on the definition of robot as "non-biological autonomous agents that we think captures the essence of the regulatory and technological challenges that robots present, and which could usefully be the basis of regulation." Second, the pair explores the future advanced capacities of robots within around a decades time. Their third claim argues a relation between the legal issues robot ethics and law experiences with the legal experiences of cyber-law. Meaning that robot ethics laws can look towards cyber-law for guidance. The "lesson" learned from cyber-law being the importance of the metaphors we understand emerging issues in technology as. This is based on if we get the metaphor wrong for example, the legislation surrounding the emerging technological issue is most likely wrong. The fourth claim they argue against is a metaphor that the pair defines as "The Android Fallacy". They argue against the android fallacy which claims humans and non-biological entities are "just like people".