Ethical sensitivity, generally defined as a person's ability to recognize ethical issues and attribute importance to them, is considered to be a crucial competency in the life of professionals and academics and an essential prerequisite to successfully meeting ethical challenges. A concept that first emerged in moral psychology almost 40 years ago, ethical sensitivity has been widely studied in healthcare, business, and other domains. Conversely, it appears to have received little to no attention within the robotics community, even though choices in the design and deployment of robots are likely to have wide-ranging, profound ethical impacts on society. Due to the negative repercussions that a lack of ethical sensitivity can have in these contexts, promoting the development of ethical sensitivity among roboticists is imperative, and endeavoring to train this competency becomes a critical undertaking. Therefore, as a first step in this direction and within the context of a broader effort aimed at developing an online interactive ethics training module for roboticists, we conducted a qualitative exploration of the ethical sensitivity of a sample of Ph.D. students in robotics using case vignettes that exemplified ethical tensions in disaster robotics.

翻译：伦理敏感性，通常被定义为个体识别伦理问题并赋予其重要性的能力，被视为专业人员和学者职业生涯中的关键素养，也是成功应对伦理挑战的必要前提。这一概念约四十年前首次出现于道德心理学领域，已在医疗护理、商业及其他领域得到广泛研究。然而，在机器人学界，尽管机器人的设计与部署选择可能对社会产生广泛而深远的伦理影响，但该概念似乎鲜少受到关注。鉴于缺乏伦理敏感性可能在这些情境中造成负面后果，促进机器人学从业者伦理敏感性的培养势在必行，而致力于训练这一能力则成为关键任务。为此，作为该方向的第一步，并在开发机器人从业者在线交互式伦理培训模块这一更广泛努力的背景下，我们采用展现灾难机器人学中伦理困境的案例片段，对机器人学博士生样本的伦理敏感性进行了定性探索。