Considerations about the relationship between animal and machine ethics

Abstract

Ethics researches morality in respect to humans and animals. Usually, it implies human morality; therefore, the focus is on human–human relationships (generally in ethics) and human–animal relationships (in animal ethics). Ethics can also deal with the morality of machines such as unmanned aerial vehicles, robots and agents or of selfdriving cars and computers in automated trading, in other words more or less autonomous systems and programs. Machine ethics almost exclusively concentrates on machine–human relationships rather than on machine–animal relationships. Before this background, this article contributes some basic onsiderations about the relationship between animal and machine ethics.