Authors
Qin Zhu and Tom Williams and Ruchen Wen
Venue
Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
Publication Year
2021
Dominant approaches to designing morally capable robots have been mainly based on rulebased ethical frameworks such as deontology and consequentialism. These approaches have
encountered both philosophical and computational limitations. They often struggle to
accommodate remarkably diverse, unstable, and complex contexts of human-robot interaction.
Roboticists and philosophers have recently been exploring underrepresented ethical traditions
such as virtuous, role-based, and relational ethical frameworks for designing morally capable
robots. This paper employs the lens of ethical pluralism to examine the notion of role-based
morality in the global context and discuss how such cross-cultural analysis of role ethics can
inform the design of morally competent robots. In doing so, it first provides a concise
introduction to ethical pluralism and how it has been employed as a method to interpret issues in
computer and information ethics. Second, it reviews specific schools of thought in Western ethics
that derive morality from role-based obligations. Third, it presents a more recent effort in
Confucianism to reconceptualize Confucian ethics as a role-based ethic. This paper then
compares the shared norms and irreducible differences between Western and Eastern
approaches to role ethics. Finally, it discusses how such examination of pluralist views of role
ethics across cultures can be conducive to the design of morally capable robots sensitive to
diverse value systems in the global context.