Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Evil and roboethics in management studies

  • Open Forum
  • Published:
AI & SOCIETY Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In this article, I address the issue of evil and roboethics in the context of management studies and suggest that management scholars should locate evil in the realm of the human rather than of the artificial. After discussing the possibility of addressing the reality of evil machines in ontological terms, I explore users’ reaction to robots in a social context. I conclude that the issue of evil machines in management is more precisely a case of technology anthropomorphization.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. The following offers definitions for some of the most important terms used in this document. ‘Evil’ is an action that is not simply morally wrong, but leaves no room for understanding or redemption. Evil is qualitatively, rather than merely quantitatively, distinct from mere wrongdoing. ‘Evil machine’ is a machine’s action that causes harm to humans and leaves no room for account or expiation. ‘Robot’ stands for both physical robots and virtual agents roaming within computer networks; ‘autonomous machine’ is a decision-making machine; ‘artificial intelligence’ is the ability of autonomous machines to make decisions; ‘intelligent machine’ and ‘autonomous intelligent machine’ are synonymous with ‘autonomous machine.’ ‘Machine’ is an umbrella term to cover robots and autonomous and intelligent machines. ‘Machine learning algorithm’ can be categorized as being supervised or unsupervised. Supervised algorithms can apply what has been learned in the past to new data. Unsupervised algorithms can draw inferences from datasets. An important distinction in this article is played between humans as designers and engineers, i.e., those who build the machine, and humans as users or clients, i.e., those who interact socially with the machine. The former are named ‘designers’ and ‘engineers,’ the latter ‘users,’ ‘investors,’ ‘clients,’ or, when the text moves from the specific case study to more general considerations, ‘humans’ and ‘humanoids.’ Giving human characteristics to artificial objects is a human trait called ‘to anthropomorphize.’ Biblical quotes are from the new revised standard version of the Oxford annotated Bible with Apocrypha (Croogan 2010).

References

  • Adams G, Balfour DL (2009) Unmasking administrative evil. M.E. Sharpe, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Allen RE (2006) Plato: the republic. Yale University Press, New Haven

    Google Scholar 

  • Arkin R (2009) Governing lethal behavior in autonomous robots. Hall/CRC, London

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Asimov I (1942) Runaround. Astounding Sci Fiction 29(2):94–103

    Google Scholar 

  • Bataille G (2001) Literature and evil. Marion Boyars Publishers, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Bernstein RJ (2002) Radical evil: a philosophical investigation. Polity Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Bostrom N (2002) Existential risks: analyzing human extinction scenarios. J Evol Technol 9:1–30

    Google Scholar 

  • Bostrom N (2014) Superintelligence: paths, dangers, strategies. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Bostrom N, Yudkowsky E (2011) The ethics of artificial intelligence. In: Ramsey William, Frankish Keith (eds) Cambridge handbook of artificial intelligence. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 316–334

    Google Scholar 

  • Calder T (2002) Towards a theory of evil: a critique of Laurence Thomas’s theory of evil acts. In: Haybron DM (ed) Earth’s abominations: philosophical studies of evil. Rodopi, New York, pp 51–61

    Google Scholar 

  • Coeckelbergh M (2009) Personal robots, appearance, and human good: a methodological reflection on roboethics. Int J Soc Robot 1(3):217–221

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coeckelbergh M (2010) You, Robot: on the linguistic construction of artificial others. AI & Soc 26(1):61–69

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coeckelbergh M (2012) Can we trust robots? Ethics Inf Technol 14(1):53–60

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Croogan MD et al (2010) The New Oxford annotated Bible with Apocrypha: new revised standard version. Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Darley JM (1992) Social organization for the production of evil. Psychol Inq 3:199–218

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Darley JM (1996) How organizations socialize individuals into evildoing. In: Messick David M, Tenbrunsel Ann E (eds) Codes of conduct: behavioral research into business ethics. Russell Sage Foundation, New York, pp 179–204

    Google Scholar 

  • Dennett DC (1987) The intentional stance. MIT Press, Boston

    Google Scholar 

  • Dennett Daniel (1998) When HAL kills, who’s to blame? Computer ethics. In: Stork D (ed) HAL’s legacy: 2001’s computer as dream and reality. MIT Press, Boston

    Google Scholar 

  • Epley N, Waytz A, Cacioppo JT (2007) On seeing human: a three-factor theory of anthropomorphism. Psychol Rev 114:864

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Floridi L, Sanders J (2004) On the morality of artificial agents. Mind Mach 14(3):349–379

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Garrard E (1998) The nature of evil. Philos Explor Int J Philos Mind Action 1(1):43–60

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Garrard E (2002) Evil as an explanatory concept. The Monist 85(2):320–336

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Geddes JL (2003) Banal evil and useless knowledge: Hannah Arendt and Charlotte Delbo on evil after the holocaust. Hypatia 18:104–115

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hastie T, Tibshirani R, Friedman J (2009) The elements of statistical learning: data mining, inference, and prediction. 2nd edn. Springer, New York

    Book  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Irrgang B (2006) Ethical acts in robotics. Ubiquity 7(34). http://www.acm.org/ubiquity. Accessed 12 Oct 2017

  • Johnson V, Brennan LL, Johnson VE (2004) Social, ethical and policy implications of information technology. Information Science Publishing, Hershey

    Google Scholar 

  • Kamm F (2007) Intricate ethics: rights, responsibilities, and permissible harm. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Kroll JA, Huey J, Barocas S, Felten EW, Reindenberg JR, Robinson DG, Yu H (eds) (2016). Accountable algorithms. Univ PA Law Rev 165: 633

  • Lee S, Kiesler S, Lau IY, Chiu C-Y (2005) Human mental models of humanoid robots. In: Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE international conference on robotics and automation (ICRA’05). Barcelona, April 18–22, pp 2767–2772

  • Lin P, Abney K, Bekey GA (2014) Robot ethics: the ethical and social implications of robotics. The MIT Press, Boston

    Google Scholar 

  • Loughnan S, Haslan N (2007) Animals and androids: implicit associations between social categories and nonhumans. Psychol Sci 18:116–121

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mittelstadt B, Allo P, Taddeo M, Wachter S, Floridi L (2016) The ethics of algorithms: mapping the debate. Big Data Soc 3(2):1–21

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nadeau JE (2006) Only androids can be ethical. In: Ford K, Glymour C (eds) Thinking about android epistemology. MIT Press, Boston, pp 241–248

    Google Scholar 

  • Neiman S (2002) Evil in modern thought. an alternative history of philosophy. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Pasquale F (2015) The black box society: the secret algorithm behind money and information. Harvard University Press, Massachusetts

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Powers TM (2009) Machines and moral reasoning. Philos Now 72:15–16

    Google Scholar 

  • Powers TM (2016) Prospects for a Kantian machine. In: Wallach W, Asaro P (eds) Machine ethics and robot ethics. Ashgate Publishing, Farnham

    Google Scholar 

  • Powers A, Kiesler S, Fussell S, Torrey C (2007) Comparing a computer agent with a humanoid robot. In: Proceedings of HRI07, pp 145–152

  • Schnall S, Cannon PR (2012) The clean conscience at work: emotions, intuitions and morality. J Manag Spiritual Relig 9(4):295–315

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sofge E (2014) Robots are evil: the sci-fi myth of killer machines. Pop Sci. http://www.popsci.com/blog-network/zero-moment/robots-are-evil-sci-fi-myth-killer-machines. Accessed 13 June 2017

  • Staub E (1989 reprinted in 1992) The roots of evil: the origins of genocide and other group violence. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

  • Steiner H (2002) Calibrating evil. The Monist 85(2):183–193

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Styhre A, Sundgren M (2003) Management is evil: management control, technoscience and saudade in pharmaceutical research. Leadersh Organ Dev J 24(8):436–446

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sullins JP (2005) Ethics and artificial life: from modeling to moral agents. Ethics Inf Technol 7:139–148

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sullins JP (2006) When is a robot a Moral Agent? Int Rev Inf Ethics 6(12):24–30

    Google Scholar 

  • Taddeo M (2010) Trust in technology: a distinctive and a problematic relation. Know Technol Policy 23(3–4):283–286

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tang TL-P (2010) Money, the meaning of money, management, spirituality, and religion. J Manag Spiritual Relig 7(2):173–189

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Turing AM (1950) Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind 59:433–460

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Wallach W, Allen C (2008) Moral machines: teaching robots right from wrong. Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Waytz A, Cacioppo J, Epley N (2010) ‘Who sees human? The stability and importance of individual differences in anthropomorphism. Perspect Psychol Sci 5:219–232

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zimbardo P (2007) The Lucifer effect: understanding how good people turn evil. Random House, New York

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Notre Dame de Namur University, 1500 Ralston Avenue, Belmont, CA, 94002, USA

    Enrico Beltramini

Authors
  1. Enrico Beltramini
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Enrico Beltramini.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Beltramini, E. Evil and roboethics in management studies. AI & Soc 34, 921–929 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0772-x

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0772-x

Keywords

Search

Navigation