Social Robotics and the Good Life: The Normative Side of Forming Emotional Bonds With Robots

Robots as social companions in close proximity to humans have a strong potential of becoming more and more prevalent in the coming years, especially in the realms of elder day care, child rearing, and education. As human beings, we have the fascinating ability to emotionally bond with various counterparts, not exclusively with other human beings, but also with animals, plants, and sometimes even objects. Therefore, we need to answer the fundamental ethical questions that concern human-robot-interactions per se, and we need to address how we conceive of »good lives«, as more and more of the aspects of our daily lives will be interwoven with social robots.

Janina Loh (née Sombetzki) is an ethicist (Stabsstelle Ethik) at Stiftung Liebenau in Meckenbeuren on Lake Constance. They have been a university assistant (Post-Doc) at Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel (2013-2016) and in the field of philosophy of technology and media at Universität Wien (2016-2021). Their main research interests lie in the field of critical posthumanism, robot ethics, feminist philosophy of technology, responsibility research, Hannah Arendt, theories of judgement, polyamory and poly-ethics as well as ethics in the sciences.

Wulf Loh is an assistant professor at the Int. Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW) at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and supervisor of various technology development projects. His areas of expertise are within applied ethics, social philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy of law.