Is It Wrong to Kick Kickable? Sociomorphing and Robotic Affordance Mixtures for Differentiation in Moral Status

"The novel capacities of multimodal generative AI suddenly bring us much closer to realizing the longstanding vision of ubiquitous social robotics” says the opening line of Robophilosophy 2024. However, the normative conceptual space for how we evaluate human treatment of robots is not quite ready for such extension. Most discussions are still motivated by mistreatment of robots (like kicking a robot) and anthropomorphism, thus resulting in worries that mistreating robots might have undesirable implications or consequences for human moral practices. Such approaches fall short of accounting for: novel and versatile “affordance mixtures” that robots can offer; novel and dynamic human-robot interaction opportunities; the usage of robots in many ways as products thanks to affordance mixtures, while they participate in the social realm. What we need to account for this versatility and novelty is a conceptual framework that can allow us to differentiate an affordance treatment of a robot from a mistreatment, an everyday usage from an abuse. I show that the conceptual tools of the OASIS framework, especially sociomorphing, can help with this differentiation.