Social robots are designed to facilitate interaction with humans through “social” behavior. As literature in the field of human–robot interaction shows, this sometimes leads to “bad” behavior towards the robot or “abuse” of the robot. Virtue ethics offers a helpful way to capture the intuition that although nobody is harmed when a robot is “mistreated”, there is still something wrong with this kind of behavior: it damages the moral character of the person engaging in that behavior, especially when it is habitual. However, one of the limitations of current applications of virtue ethics to robots and technology is its focus on the individual and individual behavior and insufficient attention to temporal and bodily aspects of virtue. After positioning its project in relation to the work of Shannon Vallor and Robert Sparrow, the present paper explores what it would mean to interpret and apply virtue ethics in a more social and relational way and a way that takes into account the link between virtue and the body. In particular, it proposes (1) to use the notion of practice as a way to conceptualize how the individual behavior, the virtue of the person, and the technology in question are related to their wider social-practical context and history, and (2) to use the notions of habit and performance conceptualize the incorporation and performance of virtue. This involves use of the work of MacIntyre, but revised by drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of habit in order to highlight the temporal, embodiment, and performative aspect of virtue. The paper then shows what this means for thinking about the moral standing of social robots, for example for the ethics of sex robots and for evaluating abusive behaviors such as kicking robots. The paper concludes that this approach does not only give us a better account of what happens when people behave “badly” towards social robots, but also suggests a more comprehensive virtue ethics of technology that is fully relational, performance-oriented, and able to not only acknowledges but also theorize the temporal and bodily dimension of virtue.

社交机器人旨在通过“社交”行为促进与人类的互动。正如人机交互领域的文献所显示的那样，这有时会导致对机器人的“不良”行为或对机器人的“滥用”。美德伦理学提供了一种有用的方法，可以理解直觉：尽管当机器人“被虐待”时没有人受到伤害，但是这种行为仍然存在一些问题：它损害了从事该行为的人的道德品格，尤其是当是习惯性的。但是，当前将道德伦理应用到机器人和技术上的局限性之一是其对个人和个人行为的关注，而对道德的时空和身体方面的关注不足。在确定了与Shannon Vallor和Robert Sparrow的工作有关的项目后，本文探讨了以更社会和更亲密的方式来解释和应用美德伦理的含义，以及一种考虑美德与身体之间联系的方式的含义。特别是，它建议（1）使用以下概念：通过实践来概念化个人行为，个人美德和相关技术与广泛的社会实践环境和历史之间的关系，以及（2）使用习惯和表现的概念概念化美德的纳入和表现。这涉及到麦金太尔著作的使用，但为了突出美德的时间，体现和表现方面，通过借鉴布迪厄的习惯概念进行了修订。然后，论文展示了这对于思考社交机器人的道德地位，例如性机器人的道德以及评估诸如踢人机器人之类的虐待行为意味着什么。本文的结论是，这种方法不仅可以更好地说明人们对社交机器人的“不良表现”会发生什么，而且还提出了一种更全面的技术道德规范，这种技术完全是关系型的，面向性能的，并且不能不仅承认而且理论化了美德的时间和身体维度。