Paula Sweeney is senior lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. She previously published in philosophy of language and the philosophy of time but most recently has been gripped by philosophical questions arising from our engagement with robots and other social technologies.
Paula Sweeney presents a compelling new theory of social robots: the fictional dualism model. Strikingly, Sweeney thinks it makes sense to respond emotionally to social robots, but that it is a category mistake to treat them with moral consideration. Why? Sweeney’s intriguing suggestion is that social robots are embodied fictional characters. -- Sven Nyholm, professor of the ethics of artificial intelligence at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and author of <i>Human and Robots: Ethics, Agency, and Anthropomorphism</i> and <i>This is Technology Ethics: An Introduction</i> In times when social robots invite emotional and social responses, it is important to reflect on the ethical questions this raises. With her fictional dualism model, Paula Sweeney distinguishes between robots as technological objects and their fictional overlays. In this way, she aims to seriously analyze our tendency to anthropomorphize with robots and the role of fiction in this, without arguing that we should grant such robots moral consideration. Recommended for everyone interested in the ethics of robotics and artificial intelligence. -- Mark Coeckelbergh, professor of philosophy, University of Vienna, author of <i>The Political Philosophy of AI, AI Ethics, and Robot Ethics</i>