title: When Should We Use Care Robots? The Nature-of-Activities Approach.
abstract: When should we use care robots? In this paper we endorse the shift from a simple normative approach to care robots ethics to a complex one: we think that one main task of a care robot ethics is that of analysing the different ways in which different care robots may affect the different values at stake in different care practices. We start filling a gap in the literature by showing how the philosophical analysis of the nature of healthcare activities can contribute to (care) robot ethics. We rely on the nature-of-activities approach recently proposed in the debate on human enhancement, and we apply it to the ethics of care robots. The nature-of-activities approach will help us to understand why certain practice-oriented activities in healthcare should arguably be left to humans, but certain (predominantly) goal-directed activities in healthcare can be fulfilled (sometimes even more ethically) with the assistance of a robot. In relation to the latter, we aim to show that even though all healthcare activities can be considered as practice-oriented, when we understand the activity in terms of different legitimate 'fine-grained' descriptions, the same activities or at least certain components of them can be seen as clearly goal-directed. Insofar as it allows us to ethically assess specific functionalities of specific robots to be deployed in well-defined circumstances, we hold the nature-of-activities approach to be particularly helpful also from a design perspective, i.e. to realize the Value Sensitive Design approach.
authors.affiliation: Section of Ethics/Philosophy of Technology, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, Jaffalaan 5, 2628 BX, Delft, The Netherlands. f.santonidesio@tudelft.nl.
authors.forename: Filippo
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Santoni de Sio
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy, University of Twente, Postbox 217, 7500 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Aimee
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: van Wynsberghe
mesh_terms: D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000941:ethics* / Q000592:standards / Q000639:trends; D006801:Humans; D012371:Robotics / Q000941:ethics* / Q000592:standards / Q000639:trends
keywords: Care Centered Value Sensitive Design; Care robot ethics; Nature-of-activities approach; Robot ethics; Value Sensitive Design