Moral Dilemmas for Moral Machines
This critiques a common practice in machine ethics for autonomous systems, highlighting risks and proposing better approaches.
The paper argues that using trolley-style moral dilemmas to validate ethical decision-making algorithms in autonomous vehicles is a misapplication of philosophical thought experiments, potentially leading to catastrophic consequences, but suggests appropriate alternative uses in machine ethics.
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.