Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to introduce and critically assess the prospect of “robotic assisted dying”, i.e., the use of (semi-) autonomous robots for the purpose of assisting willing terminally ill patients in dying, in the medical context. The central conclusion reached here is this: Assuming that physician-assisted suicide is morally permissible, if we develop robots to serve as human caregivers in medical contexts (‘carebots’), and given that assistance in dying is sometimes an important aspect of geriatric care, it is morally permissible for such robots to be able to facilitate and assist in the dying of those patients, in those contexts, at the eligible patient’s sound request. At least, there is nothing inherent in this prospect that introduces moral problems beyond those attached to the development and use of geriatric carebots or (human) physician-assisted suicide in general. One major benefit of robotic assisted dying is that the robot would always assist those consenting patients that are genuinely eligible, and thus such patients would not be at the mercy of a willing physician clause in order to have some control over the timing and manner of their death (something that routinely usurps the effectiveness of human physician-assisted suicide in practice).
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Notes
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19 people committed suicide in Foxconn factories in 2010–2011, and one potential solution that has been offered for this problem is to replace human workers with robots. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/02/foxconn-robots-worker-suicides.
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I acknowledge this as the empirical and controversial claim that it is. For a less optimistic view, see Sparrow and Sparrow [7].
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Elsewhere [8], I have argued that autonomous robots should be programmed to be pacifists (rather than ‘warists’). While I will not argue for it here, there is nothing about robotic assisted dying that would be inconsistent with that view, despite the fact that such robots would be contributing to the death of their human patients (at the patient’s sound request).
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Tonkens, R. (2015). Ethics of Robotic Assisted Dying. In: van Rysewyk, S., Pontier, M. (eds) Machine Medical Ethics. Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering, vol 74. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08108-3_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08108-3_13
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