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 humanhuman relationships (generally in ethics) and humananimal relationships (in animal ethics). Ethics can also deal with the morality of machines such as unmanned aerial vehicles, robots and agents or of self-driving cars and computers in automated trading, in other words more or less autonomous systems and programs. Machine ethics almost exclusively concentrates on machinehuman relationships rather than on machineanimal relationships. Before this background, this article contributes some basic considerations about the relationship between animal and machine ethics.