Philosophical Foundations of Criminal Law in the Age of Robots

Robots are made to serve humans in carrying out tasks that are hard, dangerous, or repetitive, as well as for entertainment.

Despite their (generally) benign objectives, robots may promote harmful outcomes that are under the radar of criminal law. One of the main aims of criminal law is to stabilize society. If something wrong is done, the law provides ways of responding to it.

The situation could be complicated by the wider application of robots in social life: not only do they disrupt the practice of law, they also have the potential to challenge its very foundations. The main aim of the ROBOCRIM project is to build a philosophical ground for criminal law that accommodates robots.

I will ask, “How can the philosophical foundations of criminal law be reconstructed to accommodate robots?” instead of, “How to accommodate robots into criminal law?” which is the usual formulation. This shifts the approach to the discussion on robots and their alignment with law and social life.

The project will be conducted within three interrelated work streams. The first stream will be devoted to robots and their status from the perspective of the philosophy of criminal law.

The second stream will focus on the foundation of a new account of criminal law, which I call the “phenomenological account”.

The emphasis in the third stream will be on building models of institutions that accommodate robots within criminal law, to be tested using experimental methods.

These new models of criminal response to crimes committed by robots treat robots as initiators of events that require a response from criminal law rather than as individual agents that could be responsible for their actions. This, combined with a novel account of criminal law, makes the project ground-breaking.

It is interdisciplinary, employs multiple methods, and will shed new light on how robots might better fit into society in general, and criminal law in particular.