An Analysis of Barriers to Embedding Moral Principles in a Robot

Abstract

One of the difficulties to embed moral principles in a robot is the barriers due to moral principles themselves. The barriers are analysed from four specific topics. The first is about the difference between value judgments and fact judgments. The following analyses focus on the specific moral barriers resulted respectively from deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics. These analyses show that it is much harder than what we thought to make a moral robot. If we forget the reductionism, the method used commonly in moral philosophy, we should find a new direction to solve the problem. It is highly possible that human beings can find a better way to improve their own moral cultivation while they try to make moral machines.