ABSTRACT
Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the principles and criteria necessary to distinguish right from wrong. Its millennia-long history is rich and encompasses different traditions, which originate from different intuitions about the fundamental nature of good and evil. Consequentialism and deontology represent the standard positions in most debates in applied ethics. Both approaches aim to provide prescriptive rules and normative principles to distinguish morally right actions or decisions from the morally wrong ones. Virtue ethics emphasizes that good conduct emerges spontaneously when one follows one's “good nature”, that is, the positive dispositions embedded in the moral character. A robot might be unable to appropriately recognize and value the socio-cultural specificity of the students and their background, such as their ethnicity, gender, tradition, or religion. Robots are unaware of the qualitative component of that feeling, or of the situations in which humans experience it, because they do not have conscious experience in the first place.
