Abstract
The advent of emerging technologies has introduced intelligent artifacts as distinctive moral agents. While care ethics has expanded to include animals, ecology, and public policy, it remains silent on the ethical dimensions of caring for intelligent artifacts. Intelligent artifacts and their digital remnants highlight uncertainties in the human-machine relationship and accentuate the "otherness" of objects. Given the inherent "otherness" of objects, there is a clear need to clarify this new ethical relationship between humans and objects. This paper advocates for otherness-centered design ethics, an extension of traditional care ethics to incorporate intelligent artifacts as non-human Others. Based on object-turn ethics, the paper proposes three strategies for caring for intelligent artifacts. This ethical approach goes beyond anthropocentrism by redefining the moral status of the object of care, expanding the "moral constituency" of human ethical responsibility.
Keywords
alternative design ethics; otherness-centered; intelligent artifact; new care ethics
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.409
Citation
Zhang, L., Zhang, B., and Liu, Y. (2024) An alternative design ethics of otherness-centered: Caring for intelligent artifacts, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.409
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
An alternative design ethics of otherness-centered: Caring for intelligent artifacts
The advent of emerging technologies has introduced intelligent artifacts as distinctive moral agents. While care ethics has expanded to include animals, ecology, and public policy, it remains silent on the ethical dimensions of caring for intelligent artifacts. Intelligent artifacts and their digital remnants highlight uncertainties in the human-machine relationship and accentuate the "otherness" of objects. Given the inherent "otherness" of objects, there is a clear need to clarify this new ethical relationship between humans and objects. This paper advocates for otherness-centered design ethics, an extension of traditional care ethics to incorporate intelligent artifacts as non-human Others. Based on object-turn ethics, the paper proposes three strategies for caring for intelligent artifacts. This ethical approach goes beyond anthropocentrism by redefining the moral status of the object of care, expanding the "moral constituency" of human ethical responsibility.