Human–robot interactions are increasingly taking place between a robot agent and a human observer who, unable to witness all aspects of the robot's behaviour, is uncertain as to how the robot will behave. This uncertainty has serious consequences when it concerns the normative aspects of machine behaviour: that is, whether the robot's actions are morally permissible. Bringing together distinct threads from robotic design and machine ethics, we demonstrate the importance of conveying ethical understanding and commitment in order to reduce moral ambiguity and how this can demand a behavioural demonstration. We provide a framework that structures these considerations in the form of a broad constraint on robot behaviour: roughly, to avoid behaviour, even if it is permissible, if that behaviour could appear impermissible. Thus, we formalise a model of communicative-behavioural ethics in human–robot interactions. We apply this constraint to a series of example cases demonstrating how it can be modified to incorporate different sources of information including preferences and probabilities. This reveals the complexity of less idealised cases and highlights how the constraint can be fine-tuned along a number of dimensions to take into account, amongst other thing, risk attitudes.

机器人代理人和观察者之间的人机交互越来越多，他们无法见证机器人行为的方方面面，因此不确定机器人的行为方式。当不确定性涉及机器行为的规范方面时，即在道德上是否允许机器人的动作时，这种不确定性将带来严重的后果。汇集了机器人设计和机器伦理方面截然不同的线索，我们证明了传达信息的重要性道德上的理解和承诺，以减少道德上的模棱两可，以及如何减少行为上的模范。我们提供了一个框架，这些框架以对机器人行为的广泛约束的形式构造了这些考虑因素：粗略地避免行为，即使行为是允许的，即使该行为看起来是不允许的。因此，我们正式确定了人机交互中的沟通行为伦理学模型。我们将此约束应用于一系列示例案例，这些案例演示了如何对其进行修改以合并包括偏好和概率在内的不同信息源。这揭示了不太理想的情况的复杂性，并强调了如何沿着多个维度对约束进行微调，以尤其考虑风险态度。