Filippo Santoni de Sio, Delft University of Technology, NL

The paper concerns the ethics of the design and use of therapeutic companionship robots like Paro by patients with mental disabilities such as dementia. The ethical debate has so far been focused mainly on the psychological benefits of Paro on the positive side, and on the risks of loss of human contact, infantilisation, and deception of patients on the negative side. In this paper I give a fresh contribution to this debate by discussing the ethical relevance of the patient’s consent to the use of the robot. This topic hasn’t been much discussed, probably as it is implicitly assumed that people with mental disabilities like dementia simply cannot express any valid consent to their treatment. I will challenge this assumption by looking at the recent legal debate on the legal consent to sexual intercourse by mentally disordered people. I will endorse John Stanton Ife’s claim that failing to be fully rational and autonomous agents, mentally disordered people may still express, under certain conditions, some valid consent to perform activities that they see as desirable. I will then explore the relevance of this claim for the patients’ consent to the use of companionship robots. In the final part of the paper, based on the previous discussion, some design guidelines for companionship robots are provided.