Trust in and Ethical Design of Carebots: The Case for Ethics of Care

The use of care robots in the healthcare sector is becoming more prevalent. Care robots – which may be powered  by artificial intelligence to enable them to reason, learn from its perception of the surrounding environment and respond in socially interactive ways with humans - can render assistance in caring for the elderly, children and the disabled such as to deliver timely medication and serve as social companions. The roles played by care robots may be no less significant during the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
A recent paper on “Trust in and Ethical Design of Carebots: The Case for Ethics of Care” published in the International Journal of Social Robotics by Professor Gary Chan from the Centre of AI and Data Governance shares some challenges in the use of care robots. These challenges mainly concern the extent of the care robots’ ability to care for humans, potential deception by robot morphology and communications, the extent of human reliance on or attachment to robots, and issues on informed consent regarding carebot use and potential infringements of privacy.
 
He argues that these challenges can be dealt with through proper ethical design that is aligned with engendering trust, and examines certain criteria to consider for the promotion of trustworthy and ethically designed carebots in the healthcare context.  After surveying the main ethical theories and precepts, he proposes Ethics of Care as the central ethical framework working in tandem with the tenets of Beauchamp and Childress’ Principlism (comprising the values of autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence and justice) and other ethical theories (utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics).
 
Overall, he is of the view that the Ethics of Care can offer sufficiently concrete principles and embodies values that are sensitive and applicable to the design of carebots and the contexts of caring practices whether it is to lift the patient from the bed to the wheelchair or to respect his private space.  In this way, Ethics of Care is also closely associated with the preservation and maintenance of trust.  Finally, to enhance the feasibility of the ethical design, a stakeholder approach should preferably be employed to take account of the needs and viewpoints of care recipients, their family members, human caregivers and healthcare professionals at the design stage.
 

_{*This research is supported by the National Research Foundation, Singapore under its Emerging Areas Research Projects (EARP) Funding Initiative. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of National Research Foundation, Singapore.}