To delegate or not to delegate: Care robots, moral agency and moral responsibility

The use of robots in healthcare is on the rise, from robots to assist with lifting, bathing and feeding, to robots used for social companionship. Given that the tradition and professionalization of medicine and nursing has been grounded on the fact that care providers can assume moral responsibility for the outcome of medical interventions, we must ask whether or not a robot can assume moral responsibility for the outcome of its actions. In this paper I discuss the issue of moral agency and moral responsibility in terms of care robots and care contexts. With an understanding that the roles of care robots need to be limited to prevent the delegation of tasks which require moral responsibility, I discuss the design of a robot prototype using a method for the design of future robots tailored to addressing ethical concerns. This approach is called the Care Centered Value Sensitive Design approach and reveals itself to be the most promising method for integrating ethical deliberation into the design of future care robots.