Experimental and Integrative Approaches to Robo-Ethics. Special issue

The development and diffusion of social robots gives increasingly rise to ethical and legal concerns related to, e.g., responsibility assignments in cooperative tasks, implementation of moral rules in robots, possible dual uses and misuses of artificial agents, unintended modifications of social, cognitive, emotive and communication abilities in humans interacting with robots. The urgency of developing effective ethical inquiries related to these issues leads specialists to acknowledge the need to overcome classical approaches, based exclusively on philosophical analysis. Emerging trends are incorporating, within the frameworks of ethical inquiries on social robots, a series of methods, tools and scenarios defining empirical research in Social Robotics and HRI. The main goal of the Experimental and Integrative Approaches to Robo-ethics special issue is to represent and stimulate the current front-line debate on possibilities, limits and ways of this new orientation, with a specific focus on the role that experiments can play in addressing ethical and legal issues concerning social human-robot interaction.