Moral Competence in Robots?

I start with the premise that any social robot must have moral competence. I offer a framework for what moral competence is and sketch the prospects for it to be developed in artificial agents. After considering three proposals for requirements of “moral agency” I propose instead to examine moral competence as a broader set of capacities. I posit that human moral competence consists of five components and that a social robot should ideally instantiate all of them: (1) A system of norms; (2) a moral vocabulary; (3) moral cognition and affect; (4) moral decision making and action; and (5) moral communication.