Dina Babushkina

Conversational agents (CA) are thought to be promising for psychotherapy because they give the impression of being able to engage in conversations with human users. However, given the high risk for therapy patients who are already in a vulnerable situation, there is a need to investigate the extent to which CA are able to contribute to therapy goals and to discuss CA’s limitations, especially in complex cases. In this paper, we understand psychotherapy as a way of dealing with existential situations and position CAs in the context of the therapeutic experience of patients. This experience is determined by the patient’s unique personal context and specific therapy goals. We suggest that psychotherapy is a fundamentally dialogical activity, because it crucially involves work on the self and one’s self-narrative. This brings us to our central question: is it possible for CAs to engage in a productive therapeutic dialogue, given their limitations as epistemic agents? We will discuss several of those limitations, show how these undermine the possibility of engaging in a therapeutic dialogue, and illustrate those limitations through discussions of the cases of grief and abuse.

Intelligent systems are increasingly incorporated into relationships that had, until recently, been reserved solely for humans, and are delegated the role of a partner, which, if human, would presuppose a system of normatively regulated interactivity. This includes expectations of reciprocity and certain attitudes/actions towards human actors, such as respect. Even though a robot cannot respect, I argue that it can be respectful. A robot can be attributed respectfulness (in the direct sense) iff its interactions with persons reflect the respectful attitude of the humans involved in its design and operation. Robot respectfulness is a compound of (a) robotic actions governed by principles that (b) reflect the attitude of respect for persons by humans involved in its design, implementation, and professional use. I define respect for persons as a commitment to core values that make someone a person (i.e., intellect, rationality of reactive attitudes, autonomy, personal integrity, and trust in expertise).

This paper approaches the interaction of a health professional with an AI system for diagnostic purposes as a hybrid decision making process and conceptualizes epistemo-ethical constraints on this process. We argue for the importance of the understanding of the underlying machine epistemology in order to raise awareness of and facilitate realistic expectations from AI as a decision support system, both among healthcare professionals and the potential benefiters (patients). Understanding the epistemic abilities and limitations of such systems is essential if we are to integrate AI into the decision making processes in a way that takes into account its applicability boundaries. This will help to mitigate potential harm due to misjudgments and, as a result, to raise the trust—understood here as a belief in reliability of—in the AI system. We aim at a minimal requirement for AI meta-explanation which should distinguish machine epistemic processes from similar processes in human epistemology in order to avoid confusion and error in judgment and application. An informed approach to the integration of AI systems into the decision making for diagnostic purposes is crucial given its high impact on health and well-being of patients.

I argue that, according to F. H. Bradley’s Ethical Studies, duties of our station are not morally obligatory unless they are required from an ideal point of view. I support my interpretation by showing that Bradley places the ideal point of view higher than the social and requires that what society demands from us is evaluated from that higher point of view. My argument relies on a detailed analysis of “my station and its duties”. The phrase must be understood as a category that refers to different concepts throughout Ethical Studies, and embraces several theses, each involving a number of claims, only a few of which Bradley accepts. I argue that Bradley rejects the normative thesis of MSID theory that identifies moral obligation with social requirements because he finds bottom-up idealization unsatisfactory. Bradley’s inclusion of “my station and its duties” in the moral ideal must be understood as amounting to the claim that a positional duty is morally obligatory only when it is justified by the norms governing pre-institutionalised relationships.