The paper has two main objectives: to examine the challenges arising from the use of carebots as well as to discuss how the design of carebots can deal with these challenges. First, it notes that the use of carebots to take care of the physical and mental health of the elderly, children and the disabled as well as to serve as assistive tools and social companions encounter a few main challenges. They relate to the extent of the care robots’ ability to care for humans, potential deception by robot morphology and communications, (over)reliance on or attachment to robots, and the risks of carebot use without informed consent and potential infringements of privacy. Secondly, these challenges impinge upon issues of ethics and trust which are somewhat overlapping in terms of concept and practice. The existing ethical guidelines, standards and regulations are general in nature and lack a central ethical framework and concrete principles applicable to the care contexts. Hence, to deal with these important challenges, it is proposed in the third part of the paper that carebots be designed by taking account of Ethics of Care as the central ethical framework. It argues that the Ethics of Care offer the following advantages: (a) it provides sufficiently concrete principles and embodies values that are sensitive and applicable to the design of carebots and the contexts of caring practices; (b) it coheres with the tenets of Principlism and select ethical theories (utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics); and (c) it is closely associated with the preservation and maintenance of trust.

本文有两个主要目标：检查使用护理机器人带来的挑战，以及讨论护理机器人的设计如何应对这些挑战。首先，它指出，使用护理机器人来照顾老人、儿童和残疾人的身心健康以及作为辅助工具和社交伙伴遇到了一些主要挑战。它们涉及护理机器人照顾人类的能力程度、机器人形态和通信的潜在欺骗、（过度）依赖或依附于机器人，以及未经知情同意使用护理机器人的风险和潜在的隐私侵犯。其次，这些挑战涉及在概念和实践方面有些重叠的道德和信任问题。现有的道德准则，标准和法规本质上是一般性的，缺乏适用于护理环境的核心伦理框架和具体原则。因此，为了应对这些重要挑战，本文的第三部分建议通过将护理伦理作为核心伦理框架来设计护理机器人。它认为护理伦理具有以下优势： (a) 它提供了足够具体的原则并体现了对护理机器人的设计和护理实践的背景敏感和适用的价值观；(b) 它与原则主义的信条相一致，并选择了伦理理论（功利主义、道义论和美德伦理学）；(c) 它与维护和维持信任密切相关。