Introduction

The majority of work concerning the ethics of artificial intelligence and robots focuses on what philosophers call an agent-oriented problematic. This is true for what Gianmarco Veruggio (2005) called “roboethics”; for what Michael and Susan Leigh Anderson (2011) have designated Machine Ethics; for what Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen (2009, 4) propose with the concept “artificial moral agent” or AMA; and for Robot Ethics as developed by Patrick Lin et al. (2012 and 2017). It also holds for most of the work that is currently being done in robot law, policy, and ethics. There are, for instance, a growing number of publications concerning: the safety and reliability of self-driving vehicles (Hammond 2016, Lin 2016, Nyholm and Smids 2016, Casey 2017); efforts to engineer intelligent systems that are designed to value human life, or what is called “friendly AI” (Yudkowsky 2001, Rubin 2011, Muehlhauser and Bostrom 2014); a seemingly inexhaustible supply of predictions of technological unemployment and the potentially adverse consequences of increased automation for individuals and human society (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2011, Ford 2015, Frey and Osborne 2017, LaGrandeur and Hughes 2017); and debates over the social costs and consequences of autonomous weapon systems (Arkin 2009, Sharkey 2012, Bhuta et al. 2016, Leveringhaus 2016, Krishnan 2016), child- and elder-care robots (Sparrow and Sparrow 2006, Anderson and Anderson 2008, Sharkey and Sharkey 2010, Beran and Ramirez-Serrano 2010, Bemelmans et al. 2010, Whitby 2010, Sharkey and Sharkey 2012), social and sociable robots (Breazeal 2002, Nørskov 2016, Seibt et al. 2016), and even sex machines (Levy 2007, Samani et al. 2010, Sullins 2012, Ess 2016, Richardson 2016a and 2016b, Lee 2017, Sharkey et al. 2017, Danaher and McArthur 2017). The organizing question behind many of these efforts is: “What can and should robots do?” This is principally an inquiry regarding the opportunities and challenges of machine action or agency, and it is important insofar as it concerns the impact and consequences of robots in our world.