The Ethical Treatment of Artificially Conscious Robots

The ethical aspects of robotics have recently gained sufficient importance to be debated in international forums and to be endowed with their own collective nametag—roboethics. Almost all of the discussion within the roboethics community and elsewhere has thus far centred on questions of the form: “Is it ethical to develop and use robots for such-and-such a purpose?”, questions based upon doubts about the effect that a particular type of robot is likely to have, both on society in general and on those with whom the robots will interact in particular. What has usually been missing from the debate is the complementary question: “Is it ethical to treat robots in such-and-such a way?” Here we attempt to redress the balance, having first reviewed some of the relevant literature.