Abstract
How can we plausibly refer to robots as artificial moral agents? Considering the useful classification of the philosopher of the field of artificial intelligence James H. Moor, who identified four different kinds of ethical, I will argue that the term of artificial moral agent is philosophically illegitimate. My argumentation is developed in three stages: the first stage addresses the actual choice of the ethical principles to be programmed into the machine; the second stage explores the difficulties inherent in giving these principles an algorithmic form; and the third focuses on the supreme difficulty arising from the very nature of moral reasoning. This analysis aims at encouraging the research on the concepts of moral reasoning and judgement. Indeed, a fine understanding of these notions should reveal the full extent of the problem with artificial moral agents; before we can discuss machine ethics or artificial ethics, we must, if we are to avoid speculation and ideology, have a clear understanding of what ethics is, what type of rationality it implements, and what is the nature of ethics and ethical conduct in general.
Translated from French by Katherine Mérignac.
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Notes
- 1.
Wallach and Allen, who do not make these distinctions in their book, are nevertheless clearly thinking about this when they say: “Moral agents monitor and regulate their behaviour in light of the harms their actions may cause or the duties they may neglect. Humans should expect nothing less of AMAs. A good moral agent is one that can detect the possibility of harm or neglect of duty, and can take steps to avoid or minimize such undesirable outcomes” [2].
- 2.
This fetish for action is emblemised by the canonical example of the trolley problem, which is regarded as ‘fundamental’ to moral reasoning. This example, first presented by Philippa Foot in 1967, has since been regarded as the touchstone of ethics. And it does indeed work well with machine ethics; unsurprisingly, in [2] it is used to introduce the general theme.
- 3.
The distinction between conduct that conforms to ethics and ethical conduct itself is exactly what Kant had in mind when he distinguished between acting in accordance with duty and acting out of duty.
References
Moor, J.H.: The nature, importance, and difficulty of machine ethics. IEEE Intell. Syst. 21(4), 18–21 (2006)
Moor, J.H.: Four kinds of ethical robots. Philosophy Now 72, 12–14 (2009)
Wallach, W., Allen, C.: Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2009)
Anderson, M., Anderson, S.: Machine ethics: creating an ethical intelligent agent. AI Mag. 28(4), 15–26 (2007)
Hunyadi, M.: L’Homme en contexte. Cerf, Paris (2012)
Laumond, J.-P.: Interview; La méthode scientifique, France Culture radio, 14 June 2017
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Hunyadi, M. (2019). Artificial Moral Agents. Really?. In: Laumond, JP., Danblon, E., Pieters, C. (eds) Wording Robotics. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 130. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17974-8_5
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