Acting vs. being moral: The limits of technological moral actors

An autonomous robot (physical or digital artificial being) may be capable of producing actions that if performed by a human could be considered moral, by mimicking its creators actions or following their programmed instructions, but it cannot be moral. Morality cannot be fully judged by any behavioral test, as the answer to moral questions is less important than the process followed in arriving at the answer (as evidenced by disagreement among ethicists on the correct answer to many such questions based on the individual´s moral style). The distinction between acting and being moral was recently considered for lethal autonomous military robots [1], and in this paper is further clarified in the context of more broad applications. In addition such a distinction has implications for what types of tasks autonomous robots should not be allowed to do, based on what must be moral decisions. Here we draw a distinction between what might be illegal for an agent to do (which relates more to the agreed upon laws of the current political leadership), and what actions are so innately moral decisions that we cannot delegate them to a machine, no matter how advanced it appears.