Abstract
With the rapid growth in research on and development of autonomous machines, machine ethics, which used to be “just a theory”, has gained greater practical importance. In this paper, we present a logical approach to machine ethics. Our objective is to enable autonomous machines to behave in morally appropriate ways following well-defined ethical principles, exercising sound ethical judgement. Since moral reasoning involves selecting appropriate behavioural actions with varying preconditions, we propose a non-monotonic reasoning model and encode the model through two types of well-known ethical frameworks: the consequentialist approach to ethics and the deontological approach to ethics. The computational model is developed using Answer Set Programming in a situation calculus framework. We apply our model to a few paradigmatic scenarios that can be encountered in autonomous driving and interactions with social robots. Our study shows that the proposed model is applicable to a wide range of scenarios and leads to appropriately different reasoning outputs in different ethical frameworks.
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Notes
- 1.
In this paper we will use the adjectives moral and ethical interchangeably, although some distinction is occasionally made in the literature and common parlance.
- 2.
Derived from the Greek root deon meaning duty.
- 3.
Consequentialism is rather misleadingly attributed to Aristotle in this work. The combination of perfectionism (a non-welfarist theory of value) with elements of utilitarianism may lead to what is called perfectionist consequentialism or, “in deference to its Aristotelian roots, eudaemonistic consequentialism” [24]. Nonetheless, contextual reading of the example given in [11] of lie as a (negative) value may be taken to be close to eudaemonistic consequentialism in spirit.
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Limarga, R., Pagnucco, M., Song, Y., Nayak, A. (2020). Non-monotonic Reasoning for Machine Ethics with Situation Calculus. In: Gallagher, M., Moustafa, N., Lakshika, E. (eds) AI 2020: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. AI 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12576. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64984-5_16
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