Abstract
This chapter attempts to specify some of the requirements of ethical robotic systems. It begins with a short story by John McCarthy entitled, “The Robot and the Baby,” that shows how difficult it is for a rational robot to be ethical. It then characterizes the different types of “ethical robots” to which this approach is relevant and the nature of ethical questions that are of concern. The second section distinguishes between the different aspects of ethical systems and attempts to focus on ethical reasoning. First, it shows that ethical reasoning is essentially non-monotonic and then that it has to consider the known consequences of actions, at least if we are interested in modeling the consequentialist ethics. The two last sections, i.e., the third and the fourth, present different possible implementations of ethical reasoners, one being based on ASP (answer set programming) and the second on the BDI (belief, desire, intention) framework for programming agents.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
\(\phi \prec \phi '\) means that ϕ′ is worse than ϕ.
References
McCarthy, J.: The robot and the baby. http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/robotandbaby/ (2001)
Asimov, I.: I, Robot. Gnome Press, New York (1950)
Wallach, W., Allen, C.: Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong. Oxford University Press, New York (2008)
Čapek, K.: R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Oxford University Press, London (1947)
Ganascia, J.G.: Ethics of cockfight, botfight and other fights. In: Proceedings of Computer Ethics and Philosophical Enquiry Conference (CEPE 2011), Milwaukee, WI, June. INSEIT (2011)
Guizzo, E.: The man who made a copy of himself. IEEE Spectr. 47(4), 44–56 (2010)
Mori, M.: Bukimi no tani [the uncanny valley]. Energy 7, 33–35 (1970)
Harman, G.: Explaining Value and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Clarendon Press, Oxford (2000)
vonWright, G.H.: Deontic logics. Mind 60, 1–15 (1951)
Gensler, H.: Formal Ethics. Routledge, London (1996)
Powers, T.: Deontological machine ethics. Technical report, American Association of Artificial Intelligence Fall Symposium 2005, Washington, DC (2005)
Bringsjord, S., Arkoudas, K., Bello, P.: Toward a general logicist methodology for engineering ethically correct robots. Technical report, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy (2006)
van Frassen, B.: Values and the heart’s command. J. Philos. 70, 5–19 (1973)
Horty, J.: Moral dilemmas and nonmonotonic logic. J. Philos. Log. 23, 35–65 (1994)
Meyer, J.-J.Ch., Dignum, F.P.M., Wieringa, R.: The paradoxes of deontic logic revisited: a computer science perspective. Technical report, UU-CS-1994-38, Utrecht University, Department of Computer Science, Utrecht (1994)
Chellas, B.: Modal Logic: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1980)
Hansen, J.: The paradoxes of deontic logic. Theoria 72, 221–232 (2006)
Chisholm, R.: Contrary-to-duty imperatives and deontic logic. Analysis 24, 33–36 (1963)
Forrester, J.W.: Gentle murder, or the adverbial samaritan. J. Philos. 81, 193–196 (1984)
Goble, L.: A logic for deontic dilemmas. J. Appl. Log. 3(3–4), 461–483 (2005)
Hansen, J.: Deontic logics for prioritized imperatives. Artif. Intell. Law 14, 1–34 (2006)
Brewka, G.: Reasoning about priorities in default logic. In: Hayes-Roth, B., Korf, R.E. (eds.) Proceedings of the 12th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Seattle, vol. 2, pp. 940–945. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (1994)
Dabringer, G. (ed.): Ethical and Legal Aspects of Unmanned Systems Interviews. Ethica Themen, Institut für Religion und Frieden (2011)
Kant, I.: Critique of practical reason. In: Paperback, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1997)
Kant, I.: Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals. In: Paperback, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1998)
Constant, B.: Des réactions politiques. Éditions Flammarion, Paris (1988)
Ganascia, J.G.: Modelling ethical rules of lying with answer set programming. Ethics Inf. Technol. 9(1), 39–47 (2007)
Gelfond, M.: Answer sets. In: Handbook of Knowledge Representation, Chap. 7 Elsevier, San Diego (2007)
Rao, A., Georgeff, M.: Bdi agents: from theory to practice. In: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multiagent Systems, ICMAS95, vol. 95, pp. 312–319 (Technical Note 56) (1995)
Rao, A.S., Georgeff, M.P.: Modeling rational agents within a BDI-architecture. In: Allen, J., Fikes, R., Sandewall, E. (eds.) Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, pp. 473–484. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Mateo (1991)
Lifschitz, V.: What is answer set programming? In: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1594–1597. MIT Press, Cambridge (2008)
Baral, C.: Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Declarative Problem Solving. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2003)
Newell, A.: The knowledge level. Artif. Intell. J. 18, 87–127 (1982)
Russel, S., Norvig, P.: Artificial Intelligence a Modern Approach. Series in Artificial Intelligence. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1995)
Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2002)
van Riemsdijk, B., Dastani, M., Meyer, J.J.C.: Goals in conflict: semantic foundations of goals. Int. J. Auton. Agent Multi-Agent Syst. 18(3), 471–500 (2009)
Coste-Marquis, S., Lang, J., Liberatore, P., Marquis, P.: Expressive power and succinctness of propositional languages for preference representation. In: Proceedings of the 9th KR, pp. 203–212 (2004)
Hindriks, K.V., Boer, F.S.D., Hoek, W.V.D., Meyer, J.J.C.: Agent programming with declarative goals. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Intelligent Agents VII. Agent Theories Architectures and Languages, ATAL ’00, pp. 228–243. Springer, London (2001)
de Boer, F., Hindriks, K., van der Hoek, W., Meyer, J.J.: A verification framework for agent programming with declarative goals. J. Appl. Log. 5(2), 277–302 (2007)
Horty, J.: Nonmonotonic foundations for deontic logic. In: Defeasible Deontic Logic, pp. 17–44. Kluwer Academic Publishers, London (1997)
Ganascia, J.G.: An agent-based formalization for resolving ethical conflicts. In: Konieczny, S., Meyer, T. (eds.) Workshop on Belief Change, Non-monotonic Reasoning and Conflict Resolution, Montpellier, ECAI, pp. 34–40 (2012)
Tufiş, M., Ganascia, J.G.: Grafting norms onto the BDI agent model. In: A Construction Manual for Robot’s Ethical Systems: Requirements, Methods, Implementations. MIT Press, Cambridge (2014)
Bentham, J.: Introduction to the principles of morals and legislation. In: Bowring, J. (ed.) The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Simpkin, Marshall, London (1838–1843)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ganascia, JG. (2015). Non-monotonic Resolution of Conflicts for Ethical Reasoning. In: Trappl, R. (eds) A Construction Manual for Robots' Ethical Systems. Cognitive Technologies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21548-8_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21548-8_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-21547-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-21548-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)