Mark Coeckelbergh (Int J Soc Robot 1:217–221, 2009) argues that robot ethics should investigate what interaction with robots can do to humans rather than focusing on the robot’s moral status. We should ask what robots do to our sociality and whether human–robot interaction can contribute to the human good and human flourishing. This paper extends Coeckelbergh’s call and investigate what it means to live with disembodied AI-powered agents. We address the following question: Can the human–AI interaction contribute to our moral (...) development? We present an empirically informed philosophical analysis of how the AI personal assistant Siri changes its users’ way of life, based on the responses obtained from 20 semi-directive individual interviews with Siri users. We identify changes in the users’ social interaction associated with the adoption of Siri. These changes include: (1) the indirect effect of reducing opportunities of human interaction, (2) the second-order effect of diminished expectations toward each other in a community, and (3) the acquired preference to obtain hassle-free interaction with Siri over human interaction. We examine them in relation to concerns that are voiced in the current debates over the rise of AI, namely the suspicion that humans could become overly reliant on AI (Danaher 2019) and the worry that social AI could impede on moral development (Fröding and Peterson, Ethics Inf Technol 23:207–214, 2012; Li, Ethics Inf Technol 23:543–550, 2021). We analyze the ethical costs that come from these changes in light of virtue ethics and address potential objections along the way. We end by offering directions for thinking about how to live with AI personal assistant while preserving favorable conditions for moral development. (shrink)

Debates about the moral status of social robots (SRs) currently face a second-order, or metatheoretical impasse. On the one hand, moral individualists argue that the moral status of SRs depends on their possession of morally relevant properties. On the other hand, moral relationalists deny that we ought to attribute moral status on the basis of the properties that SRs instantiate, opting instead for other modes of reflection and critique. This paper develops and defends a pragmatic approach which aims to reconcile (...) these two positions. The core of this proposal is that moral individualism and moral relationalism are best understood as distinct deliberative strategies for attributing moral status to SRs, and that both are worth preserving insofar as they answer to different kinds of practical problems that we face as moral agents. (shrink)

This Commentary critiques an extremely relational view of robot moral status, drawing out its practical implications for ethics and law. It also suggests next steps for AI ethics if extremely relational reasoning is compelling. Section I introduces the topic, distinguishing an ‘extremely relational’ view from more moderate relational views. Section II illustrates extremely relational views using the example of embodiment. Section III explores practical implications of extremely relational views for ethics and law. Section IV offers possible responses to extreme relationism. (...) Section V concludes by suggesting next steps for AI ethics. (shrink)