Artificial Emotions: Toward a Human-Centric Ethics

One of the most challenging goals in social robotics is implementing emotional skills. Making robots capable of expressing and deciphering emotions is considered crucial for allowing humans to socially interact with them. In addition to presenting technical challenges, the implementation of artificial emotions in artificial systems raises intriguing ethical issues. In this paper, moving from the case study of a human android, we present a relational perspective on human-robot interaction, claiming that, since robots are material objects not endowed with subjectivity, only an asymmetrical relationship can be established between robots and humans. Based on this claim, we deal with some of the most relevant issues in roboethics, such as transparency, trust, and authenticity. We conclude suggesting that a machine-centered approach to ethics should be abandoned in favor of a relational approach, which revalues the centrality of human being in the Human-Robot Interaction.