The emergence of moral dilemmas inside the autonomous buses poses a critical challenge, potentially leading to unforeseen consequences on road in real life and heightened risks for passengers. Existing approaches predominantly focus on ethical decision-making outside vehicles, and overlooking the unique complexities within. To fill this significant gap, this article introduces a novel ethical decision-making system for the inside of autonomous bus moral dilemmas scenarios, tackling the noncommensurability of ethical values and the intricacies of conflicting objectives. This work contributes new insights to the field of autonomous systems ethics, which establishes a foundation for future research on ethical decision-making in dynamic and morally intricate environments. Meanwhile, the proposed system’s accuracy and usability, validated through user studies, position it as a valuable tool for ensuring ethical autonomy in real-world scenarios.

The emergence of moral dilemmas inside autonomous buses can lead to unpredictable consequences for maneuver and amplify potential harms to passengers onboard. However, most existing approaches solely focus on ensuring ethical decision-making in scenarios outside of vehicles. To ensure ethical decision-making for autonomous buses when moral dilemmas occur inside, there are many urgent challenges that need to be addressed. First, the noncommensurability of ethical values presents difficulties in designing quantifiable environments and decision-making models. Moreover, ethical dilemmas involve multiple conflicting objectives, often necessitating the consideration of multiple moral theories to comprehensively evaluate different perspectives. Additionally, accurately representing these dilemmas and identifying optimal solutions that address conflicting objectives poses further challenges. This article proposes a general ethical decision-making system to handle ethical dilemmas inside autono...