Social robots and relational capacities

In this paper I argue that moral status should be grounded in whether an entity has “capacities for relations”. What this means is that in order to have moral status, the entity should be capable of engaging in meaningful relations with others. In order to defend this view, I first discuss social robots more generally. I then outline “attribution theory”, and how this gives rise to social-relational accounts of moral standing. While I think such accounts are on the right track, I believe that some capacities are still required. Drawing on communitarian ethics from an African perspective, I hope to provide some clarity on the potential for social robots to have moral status. Ultimately, I argue that, at present, such robots only have derived moral status.