The Ethical Governance for the Vulnerability of Care Robots: Interactive-Distance-Oriented Flexible Design

Zhengqing Zhang, Chenggang Zhang and Xiaomeng Li
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Zhengqing Zhang: School of Marxism, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
Chenggang Zhang: Department of Sociology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Xiaomeng Li: Department of Sociology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 4, 1-18

Abstract: The application of caring robots is currently a widely accepted solution to the problem of aging. However, for the elderly groups who live in gregarious residences and share intelligence devices, caring robots will cause intimacy and assistance dilemmas in the relationship between humans and non-human agencies. This is an information-assisted machine setting, with resulting design ethics issues brought about by the binary values of human and machine, body and mind. The “vulnerability” in risk ethics demonstrates that the ethical problems of human institutions stem from the increase of dependence and the obstruction of intimacy, which are essentially caused by the increased degree of ethical risk exposure and the restriction of agency. Based on value-sensitive design, caring ethics and machine ethics, this paper proposes a flexible design with the interaction-distance-oriented concept, and reprograms the ethical design of caring robots with intentional distance, representational distance and interpretive distance as indicators. The main purpose is to advocate a new type of human-machine interaction relationship emphasizing diversity and physical interaction.

Keywords: caring robots; elderly health management; machine ethics; vulnerability; human-machine relationship; flexible design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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