A Universal Moral Grammar (UMG) Ontology

Abstract

This paper describes an OWL ontology that is a Universal Moral Grammar (UMG). UMG has been hypothesized by students of Chomsky to play the same role in human ethics as Universal Grammar (UG) does in Linguistics. I.e., the UMG describes a moral faculty hypothesized to have a genetic basis. This approach utilizes the modular view of the mind developed by Chomsky and currently utilized by many evolutionary psychology researchers. In this paper I describe the ontology and how it represents ethical choices, rules, scenarios, and systems. This includes representation of choices governed by the golden rule, utilitarianism, and Moral Foundations Theory. The foundation for the model is an Artificial Intelligence model of events, plans, and decisions. This plan model represents what is known as Theory of Mind (TOM). The TOM model is extended to the ethical domain by an analysis of recent research in evolutionary psychology and the representation of 40 different scenarios such as the trolley problem from the philosophical, psychological, and biological literature. The ontology is an example of how semantic technology can be used to provide mathematical rigor to the study of human ethics. This version demonstrates the breadth of the UMG, that it is capable of representing many diverse examples from the literature. However, there are already meaningful results from this version such as a resolution to Hume’s Is-Ought problem.