Moral Dilemmas for Moral Machines

2022/03/08 by Travis LaCroix · 1 voice · 4 citations
Computer Science · Neuroscience · Social Sciences · #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI #Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #cs.AI #cs.CY

paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s43681-022-00134-y

AI Ethics (2022)

crossref issued 2022/03/08 · crossref published 2022/03/08 · crossref published-online 2022/03/08 · openalex publication_date 2022/03/08 · crossref created 2022/03/08 · arxiv created 2022/03/11 · arxiv updated 2022/03/14 · crossref published-print 2022/11/01 · crossref deposited 2024/09/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

Autonomous systems are being developed and deployed in situations that may require some degree of ethical decision-making ability. As a result, research in machine ethics has proliferated in recent years. This work has included using moral dilemmas as validation mechanisms for implementing decision-making algorithms in ethically-loaded situations. Using trolley-style problems in the context of autonomous vehicles as a case study, I argue (1) that this is a misapplication of philosophical thought experiments because (2) it fails to appreciate the purpose of moral dilemmas, and (3) this has potentially catastrophic consequences; however, (4) there are uses of moral dilemmas in machine ethics that are appropriate and the novel situations that arise in a machine-learning context can shed some light on philosophical work in ethics.

Citations

• Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?
• What do philosophers believe?
• Cognitive load selectively interferes with utilitarian moral judgment
• End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars
• The Moral Machine experiment
• Est-ce que vous compute? Code-switching, cultural identity, and AI

Cited by

• Strategic Polysemy in AI Discourse: A Philosophical Analysis of Language, Hype, and Power
• The linguistic dead zone of value-aligned agency, natural and artificial
• Normative Common Ground Replication (NormCoRe): Replication-by-Translation for Studying Norms in Multi-Agent AI
• Exploring Persona-dependent LLM Alignment for the Moral Machine Experiment

Discussions

• This paper builds on my prior work (also published in AI and Ethics), which explains how using moral dilemmas as validation mechanisms for "ethical AI", or as ethics benchmarks in AI, is a category mi [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]