Abstract

Debates about the moral status of social robots (SRs) currently face a second-order, or metatheoretical impasse. On the one hand, moral individualists argue that the moral status of SRs depends on their possession of morally relevant properties. On the other hand, moral relationalists deny that we ought to attribute moral status on the basis of the properties that SRs instantiate, opting instead for other modes of reflection and critique. This paper develops and defends a pragmatic approach which aims to reconcile these two positions. The core of this proposal is that moral individualism and moral relationalism are best understood as distinct deliberative strategies for attributing moral status to SRs, and that both are worth preserving insofar as they answer to different kinds of practical problems that we face as moral agents.