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27 - A Prima Facie Duty Approach to Machine Ethics

Machine Learning of Features of Ethical Dilemmas, Prima Facie Duties, and Decision Principles through a Dialogue with Ethicists

from PART IV - APPROACHES TO MACHINE ETHICS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2011

By
Susan Leigh Anderson  and
Michael Anderson
Edited by
Michael Anderson  and
Susan Leigh Anderson
Michael Anderson
Affiliation:
University of Hartford, Connecticut
Susan Leigh Anderson
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
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Summary

In our early work on attempting to develop ethics for a machine, we first established that it is possible to create a program that can compute the ethically correct action when faced with a moral dilemma using a well-known ethical theory (Anderson et al. 2006). The theory we chose, Hedonistic Act Utilitarianism, was ideally suited to the task because its founder, Jeremy Bentham (1781), described it as a theory that involves performing “moral arithmetic.” Unfortunately, few contemporary ethicists are satisfied with this teleological ethical theory that bases the rightness and wrongness of actions entirely on the likely future consequences of those actions. It does not take into account justice considerations, such as rights and what people deserve in light of their past behavior; such considerations are the focus of deontological theories like Kant's Categorical Imperative, which have been accused of ignoring consequences. The ideal ethical theory, we believe, is one that combines elements of both approaches.

The prima facie duty approach to ethical theory, advocated by W.D. Ross (1930), maintains that there isn't a single absolute duty to which we must adhere, as is the case with the two aforementioned theories, but rather a number of duties that we should try to follow (some teleological and others deontological), each of which could be overridden on occasion by one of the other duties.

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Machine Ethics , pp. 476 - 492
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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References

Anderson, M., Anderson, S., and Armen, C. (2006a), “An Approach to Computing Ethics,” IEEE Intelligent Systems, Vol. 21, no. 4.Google Scholar
Anderson, M., Anderson, S. and Armen, C. (2006b), “MedEthEx: A Prototype Medical Ethics Advisor” in Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Boston, Massachusetts, August.Google Scholar
Anderson, M. and Anderson, S. (2008), “EthEl: Toward a Principled Ethical Eldercare Robot” in Proceedings of the AAAI Fall 2008 Symposium on AI in Eldercare: New Solutions to Old Problems, Arlington, Virginia, November.Google Scholar
Anderson, M. and Anderson, S. (2010), “An Ethical Robot,” Scientific American, October.
Beauchamp, and Childress, (1979), Principles of Biomedical Ethics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bentham, J. (1781), An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Clarendon Press, Oxford.Google Scholar
Kant, I. (1785), The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. by Paton, H. J. (1964). New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Mill, J.S. (1863), Utilitarianism, Parker, Son and Bourn, LondonGoogle Scholar
Rawls, J. (1951), “Outline for a Decision Procedure for Ethics”, The Philosophical Review 60(2): 177–197.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ross, W.D. (1930), The Right and the Good, Oxford University Press, Oxford.Google Scholar

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