Can we build ‘moral robots’? If morality depends on emotions, the answer seems negative. Current robots do not meet standard
necessary conditions for having emotions: they lack consciousness, mental states, and feelings. Moreover, it is not even clear
how we might ever establish whether robots satisfy these conditions. Thus, at most, robots could be programmed to follow rules,
but it would seem that such ‘psychopathic’ robots would be dangerous since they would lack full moral agency. However, I will
argue that in the future we might nevertheless be able to build quasi-moral robots that can learn to create the appearance
of emotions and the appearance of being fully moral. I will also argue that this way of drawing robots into our social-moral
world is less problematic than it might first seem, since human morality also relies on such appearances.
Keywords Robot morality - Human morality - Emotions - Rule-following - Mental states - Feelings - Appearance