Abstract
Accidents involving autonomous vehicles (AVs) raise difficult ethical dilemmas and legal issues. It has been argued that self-driving cars should be programmed to kill, that is, they should be equipped with pre-programmed approaches to the choice of what lives to sacrifice when losses are inevitable. Here we shall explore a different approach, namely, giving the user/passenger the task (and burden) of deciding what ethical approach should be taken by AVs in unavoidable accident scenarios. We thus assume that AVs are equipped with what we call an “Ethical Knob”, a device enabling passengers to ethically customise their AVs, namely, to choose between different settings corresponding to different moral approaches or principles. Accordingly, AVs would be entrusted with implementing users’ ethical choices, while manufacturers/programmers would be tasked with enabling the user’s choice and ensuring implementation by the AV.
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Notes
- $$\begin{aligned} TDis(c_1,a_1)&= 0.36 * 1 =0.36TDis(c_2,a_2)= 0.3 * 1 =0.3 \\ NTDis(c_1,a_1) &= \frac{0.36}{0.36 + 0.3} = 0.55\\ NTDis(c_2,a_2)&= \frac{0.3}{0.36 + 0.3} = 0.45.\end{aligned}$$
For simplicity we do not consider cases when more than one choice have the same disutility for their most disadvantaged agent, such cases have to be addressed according to the principles of lexicographic order, i.e, by considering the second most disadvantaged agent, and so on.
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The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their many valuable comments and suggestions.
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Contissa, G., Lagioia, F. & Sartor, G. The Ethical Knob: ethically-customisable automated vehicles and the law. Artif Intell Law 25, 365–378 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-017-9211-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-017-9211-z