Ethical decision-making is difficult, certainly for robots let alone humans. If a robot's ethical decision-making process is going to be designed based on some approximation of how humans operate, then the assumption is that a good model of how humans make an ethical choice is readily available. Yet no single ethical framework seems sufficient to capture the diversity of human ethical decision making. Our work seeks to develop the computational underpinnings that will allow a robot to use multiple ethical frameworks that guide it towards doing the right thing. As a step towards this goal, we have collected data investigating how regular adults and ethics experts approach ethical decisions related to the use in a healthcare and game playing scenario. The decisions made by the former group is intended to represent an approximation of a folk morality approach to these dilemmas. On the other hand, experts were asked to judge what decision would result if a person was using one of several different types of ethical frameworks. The resulting data may reveal which features of the pill sorting and game playing scenarios contribute to similarities and differences between expert and non-expert responses. This type of approach to programming a robot may one day be able to rely on specific features of an interaction to determine which ethical framework to use in the robot's decision making.
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A Robot Ethics Dilemma: To Side with Folk Morality or the Experts?
Our research team has been investigating methods for enabling robots to behave ethically while interacting with human beings. Our approach relies on two main sources of data for determining what counts as “ethical” behavior. The first are the views of average adults, which we refer to “folk morality”, and the second are the views of ethics experts. Yet the enterprise of identifying what should ground a robot’s decisions about ethical matters raises many fundamental metaethical questions. Here, we focus on one main metaethical question: would reason dedicate that it is more justifiable to base a robot’s decisions on folk morality or the guidance of ethics experts? The goal of this presentation is to highlight some of the arguments for and against each respective point of view, and the implications such arguments might have for the endeavor to encode ethical decision-making processes into robots.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1848974
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10394591
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 Meeting of the International Association of Computing and Philosophy
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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