Anne Gerdes, University of Southern Denmark, DK

The Aristotelian concept of phronēsis captures the kind of situated knowledge, which is needed in order for us to understand and act morally in the specific situations in which we find ourselves. On this background, this talk discusses whether an ‘as if’ version of phronēsis, understood as situational awareness, might enable us to design a virtuous robot with ‘as if’ capabilities of the phronimos. It is argued that eventually we might see this kind of virtuous robot, but it’s ‘as if’ qualities would not be sufficient for the virtuous robot to count as an ethical agent, since phronēsis is presumably not computationally tractable.