Introduction: special issue—critical robotics research.

She argues that "social robots designed for reciprocity use reciprocity as an instrumental value to enhance acceptability of the robot", and that this is ethically questionable. As Balle also reasons, one can only make a weak claim of moral patienthood for robots, i.e., it should be regarded as "permissible rather than obligatory and individual rather than universal" as far as it happens to occur in human-robot interactions. Problematizing socio-emotional relationships with robots Social robots influence human-robot and human-human relations. Challenging sociality in human-robot interactions In exploring dimensions of human-robot relations, the two final contributions to this Special Issue question the basic premise of what (social) robots are and should be. [Extracted from the article]