Abstract
In recent years, tech evangelists have made headlines predicting that in the future manual driving will be outlawed. This essay will investigate the question whether a ban of human driven cars can be defended on moral grounds in a future scenario in which autonomous cars are going to be significantly safer than manually driven cars. This article will argue that in such a future scenario manually driven cars, for moral reasons, indeed should be banned from participating in regular traffic. Since the moral argument for outlawing manually driven cars will likely be met by resistance by car-aficionados, in the final part of the paper, we are devising a proposal for reconciling the strong moral case for a ban of manually driven cars with the widespread fondness of manual driving.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This is not say that the treshold explanation might not be a fitting explanation for other cases.
This is a slight variation on a thought experiment by Brennan (2016: 40).
What the hand grenade thought experiment shows then are two things: First, that the risk involved in traffic is non-negligble (and thus the threshold explanation does not work) and second, that people do not accept being exposed to non-neglible risks without some form of compensation (more on that on the next few pages). This is all the thought experiment is meant to show.
The tradeoff between safety and convenience differs between countries but the common theme seems to be that behavior that is deemed unnecessary risky (e.g. driving under the influence or reckless speeding) is usually forbidden.
For pleasure as opposed to, say, a means of self-protection.
Whether granting everybody the ability to choose their own ethics setting, however, is a morally desirable option is a different matter.
At the same time exposing someone to risk through driving versus through burning fuel has of course important differences. One of them is that in driving, a single driver A is usually responsible for the injury or death of a driver B, while in the environmental case the causal chain (and thus the questions of responsibility) are much more complicated.
We focus here on P3 since P4 is dependent on P3.
Contrary to popular belief, the lack of a general speed limit on the German Autobahn does not protect a driver from being held liable if an accident occurs in which excessive speed is seen as a major factor, even if the high speed is not punishable per se. The law requires drivers to only drive as fast as they are still able to keep the car under control. This means that speeds must be adapted to certain conditions like the state of the road, the amount of traffic, and weather conditions (especially visibility). Also, personal skills must be taken into consideration as well as the adequacy of the type of vehicle to be reasonably driven at high speeds.
This is a condensed version of the 5-level-taxonomy provided by the NHTSA.
One can debate whether human should always be able to trigger some kind of emergency mode that gives them control over the car even in ACS. We abstract away from those kind of emergency scenarios here since they are not relevant for our current discussion.
References
Alexander-Kearns, M., Peterson, M., & Cassady, A. (2016). The impact of vehicle automation on carbon emissions. Center for American Progress. Retrieved from https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2016/11/18/292588/theimpact-of-vehicle-automationon-carbon-emissions-where-uncertainty-lies.
Barth, M., Boriboonsomsin, K., & Wu, G. (2014). Vehicle automation and its potential impacts on energy and emissions. In G. Meyer & S. Beiker (Eds.), Road vehicle automation. Cham: Springer.
Bischoff, J., & Maciejewski, M. (2016). Autonomous taxicabs in berlin—A spatiotemporal analysis of service performance. Transportation Research Procedia,19, 176–186.
Blanco, M., Atwood, J., Russell, S., Trimble, T., McClafferty, J., & Perez, M. (2016). Automated vehicle crash rate comparison using naturalistic data. Technical report, Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.
Brennan, J. (2016). A libertarian case for mandatory vaccination. Journal of Medical Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2016-103486.
Brown, A., Gonder, J., & Repac, B. (2014). An analysis of possible energy impacts of automated vehicle. In G. Meyer & S. Beiker (Eds.), Road vehicle automation. Cham: Springer.
Caiazzo, F., Ashok, A., Waitz, I. A., Yim, S. H., & Barrett, S. R. (2013). Air pollution and early deaths in the United States, Part I: Quantifying the impact of major sectors in 2005. Atmospheric Environment,79, 198–208.
Clewlow, R. R., & Shankar Mishra, G. (2017). Disruptive transportation: The adoption, utilization, and impacts of ride-hailing in the United States. Research report UCD-ITS-RR-17-07. Davis: Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California.
Contissa, G., Lagioia, F., & Sartor, G. (2017). The ethical knob: Ethically-customisable automated vehicles and the law. Artificial Intelligence and Law,25(3), 365–378.
Dworkin, G. (2016). “Paternalism”, The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), Retrieved January, 2017 https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/paternalism.
Fagnant, D. J., & Kockelman, K. (2015). Preparing a nation for autonomous vehicles: Opportunities, barriers and policy recommendations. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 77, 167–181.
Fagnant, D., & Kockelman, K. (2016). Dynamic ride-sharing and fleet sizing for a system of shared autonomous vehicles in Austin, Texas. Transportation,45, 1–16.
Gao, P., Hensley, R., & Zielke, A. (2014). A road map to the future for the auto industry. McKinsey Quarterly, Oct (pp. 1–11).
Gogoll, J., & Müller, J. F. (2017). Autonomous cars: In favor of a mandatory ethics setting. Science and Engineering Ethics, 23(3), 681–700.
Goodall, N. (2013). Ethical decision making during automated vehicle crashes. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board.,2424, 58–65.
Goodall, N. (2014). Machine ethics and automated vehicles. In G. Meyer & S. Beiker (Eds.), Road vehicle automation (pp. 93–102). Berlin: Springer.
Hannson, S. O. (2003). Ethical criteria of risk acceptance. Erkenntnis,59, 291–309.
Hendrickson, C., Biehler, A., Mashayekh, Y. (2014). Connected and autonomous vehicles 2040 Vision; Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) report to Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), FHWA-PA-2014-004-CMU WO 1; Department of Transportation, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: Harrisburg, PA.
Hof, R. (2015). Tesla’s Elon musk thinks cars you can actually drive will be outlawed eventually, Forbes. Retrieved January, 2017 from http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/03/17/elon-musk-eventually-cars\-you-can-actually-drive-may-be-outlawed/.
Honan, M. (2015). Google’s cute cars and the ugly end of driving, buzzfeed. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mathonan/googles-cute-cars-and-the-ugly-end-of-driving. Accessed Feb 2018.
KPMG (2015). Marketplace of change: Automobile insurance in the era of autonomous vehicles—Whitepaper. https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/pdf/2016/06/id-market-place-of-change-automobile-insurance-in-the-era-of-autonomous-vehicles.pdf.
Kyriakidis, M., Happee, R., & de Winter, J. C. (2015). Public opinion on automated driving: Results of an international questionnaire among 5000 respondents. Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, 32, 127–140.
Lin, P. (2014). Here’s a terrible idea: Robot cars with adjustable ethics settings. WIRED. Accessed February, 2016 from http://www.wired.com/2014/08/heres-a-terrible-idea-robot-cars-with-adjustable-ethics-settings/.
Masoud, N., & Jayakrishnan, R. (2017). Autonomous or driver-less vehicles: implementation strategies and operational concerns. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Reviews,108, 179–194.
Mccarthy, J. F. (2017). Sustainability of self-driving mobility: An analysis of carbon emissions between autonomous vehicles and conventional modes of transportation (Doctoral dissertation).
Mersky, A. C., & Samaras, C. (2016). Fuel economy testing of autonomous vehicles. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies,65, 31–48.
Mill, J. S. (1978). On liberty, Indianapolis.
Millar, J. (2014). Proxy prudence: Rethinking models of responsibility for semiautonomous robots. In We Robot 2014 proceedings. http://robots.law.miami.edu/2014/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Proxy-Prudence-Rethinking-Models-of-Responsibility-for-Semi-autonomous-Robots-Millar.pdf
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. (2013). Preliminary Statement of Policy Concerning Automated Vehicles. Retrieved February, 2016 from http://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/rulemaking/pdf/Automated_Vehicles_Policy.pdf.
National Center for Statistics and Analysis. (2019). 2018 fatal motor vehicle crashes: Overview. (Traffic Safety Facts Research Note. Report No. DOT HS 812 826). Washington, DC: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Norcross, A. (1998). Great harms from small benefits grow: How death can be outweighed by headaches. Analysis,58(2), 152–158.
OECD. (2015). Urban mobility system upgrade. How shared self-driving cars could change city traffic.
Ross, P. (2014). Driverless cars: Optional by 2024, mandatory by 2044. IEEE Spectrum. Retrieved August, 2017 from https://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/advanced-cars/driverless-cars-optional-by-2024-mandatory-by-2044.
Sandberg, A., & Bradshaw, H. G. (2013). Autonomous vehicles, moral agency and moral proxyhood. In Beyond AI conference proceedings. Springer, Berlin.
Santoni de Sio, F., & Van den Hoven, J. (2018). Meaningful human control over autonomous systems: A philosophical account. Frontiers in Robotics and AI,5, 15.
Sparrow, R., & Howard, M. (2017). When human beings are like drunk robots: driverless vehicles, ethics, and the future of transport. Transportation Research Part C. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2017.04.014.
Stern, R. E., Cui, S., Delle Monache, M. L., Bhadani, R., Bunting, M., Churchill, M., et al. (2018). Dissipation of stop-and-go waves via control of autonomous vehicles: Field experiments. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies,89, 205–221.
Taiebat, M., Brown, A. L., Safford, H. R., Qu, S., & Xu, M. (2018). A review on energy, environmental, and sustainability implications of connected and automated vehicles. Environmental Science and Technology,52(20), 11449–11465.
Torbert, R., & Herrschaft, B. (2016). Driving miss hazy: Will driverless cars decrease fossil fuel consumption? Rocky Mountain Institute.
Wenar, L. (2015). Rights. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), Retrieved June, 2018 from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/rights.
Williams, D. (2010). Why we still enjoy driving. The Telegraph. Retrieved April, 2017 from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/road-safety/8112638/Why-we-still-enjoy-driving.html.
World Health Organisation. (2015). Number of road traffic deaths. Global Health Observatory (GHO) data. http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/number_text/en/.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Müller, J.F., Gogoll, J. Should Manual Driving be (Eventually) Outlawed?. Sci Eng Ethics 26, 1549–1567 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-020-00190-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-020-00190-9