Should Care Robots Answer? Rethinking Moral Answerability Beyond Humans

AI-based systems increasingly operate in socially and ethically sensitive domains such as healthcare, raising pressing questions about responsibility. This article focuses on a specific form of moral responsibility-answerability-in the context of AI-based care robots. Although such systems are not moral agents in a human-like sense, their actions are embedded in social practices in which demands for explanation play a significant role. The article develops a structured analytical framework that conceptualizes answerability as comprising both a subjective dimension (the actor's reasons and justifications) and an objective dimension (the comprehensibility and moral quality of explanations). It thereby clarifies the conditions under which demands for explanation arise and how they can be normatively assessed. Applying this framework to care robots, the article argues that these systems can be meaningfully treated as answerable, even though they are not accountable-in human terms. Concrete care scenarios illustrate that affected individuals may be entitled to demand explanations from robots, despite their technically mediated and limited responses. While current systems can only approximate the requirement of sincerity in a minimal sense, future developments may enable more sophisticated forms of technical answerability without necessarily grounding full moral responsibility.