ABSTRACT
Social robots are those technologies designed or used to engage human instinctive social responses. This chapter introduces an analogy from Aristotle that can help navigate issues involving the value of appearance in friendship, as they arise in social robotics. Aristotle's eudaemonist theory of virtue strikes many as a promising way to approach ethical questions involving emerging technologies. It invites people to consider what constitutes a good, flourishing life, and the impact of both large and small actions and influences on their ability to live such a life. Unlike friendship, the value of an economy appears to be primarily instrumental, and one might opt for a world without economies if the same external goods were equally well realized by other means, unlike in friendship. The Aristotle's analogy introduces an account of the badness of sociable robots—not always an overriding badness, but a reason to be judicious in their design and use.
