One Formalization of Virtue Ethics via Learning
This work addresses the formalization of virtue ethics for automation, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for other ethical traditions.
The paper tackles the problem of formalizing virtue ethics for automation by proposing an embryonic formalization using a cognitive calculus that subsumes first-order logic, but no concrete results or numbers are provided.
Given that there exist many different formal and precise treatments of deontologi- cal and consequentialist ethics, we turn to virtue ethics and consider what could be a formalization of virtue ethics that makes it amenable to automation. We present an embroyonic formalization in a cognitive calculus (which subsumes a quantified first-order logic) that has been previously used to model robust ethical principles, in both the deontological and consequentialist traditions.