Artificial Ethics

Abstract

A new morality is generated in the present scientific and technical environment, and a new ethics is needed, an ethics which may be found in both individual and social morality, which can guide a moral evolution of different cultural fields and which has the chance to keep alive the moral culture itself. This chapter points out first the scientific, technical, and philosophical premises of artificial ethics. The specific, the status, and the role of artificial ethics is described by selecting ethical procedures, norms, and values that are suitable to be applied both by human and artificial moral agents. Moral intelligence as a kind of practical intelligence is studied and its role in human and artificial moral conduct is evaluated. Common features of human and artificial moral agents are presented. Specific features of artificial moral agents are analyzed. Artificial ethics is presented as part of the multi-set of artificial cognition, discovery, activity, organization, and evolution ways. A meta-ethical survey establishes the place of artificial ethics within the group of new and emergent ethical fields of the computer culture. Natural and artificial evolution are studied from an interdisciplinary and even from an intercultural perspective, and the co-evolution of human and artificial moral agents is sketched by means of technological and social prognosis.