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The rapid developments of robotics technologies in the last twenty years of the XX century have greatly encouraged research on the use of robots for surgery, diagnosis, rehabilitation, prosthetics, and assistance to disabled and elderly people. This chapter provides an overview of robotic technologies and systems for health care, focussing on various ethical problems that these technologies give rise to. These problems notably concern the protection of human physical and mental integrity, autonomy, responsibility, and fair access to medical resources.

Robot ethics is a branch of applied ethics which endeavours to isolate and analyse ethical issues arising in connection with present and prospective uses of robots. These issues span human autonomy protection and promotion, moral responsibility and liability, privacy, fair access to technological resources, social and cultural discrimination, in addition to the ethical dimensions of personhood and agentivity. This chapter examines the distinctive role that epistemological and methodological reflections on robotics play in ethical inquiries on robotics. In particular, reflections of this sort on models of robot-environment interactions and on models of learning robotic systems are brought to bear on the analysis of autonomy and responsibility issues in robot ethics.