Abstract
Virtue ethics has many times been suggested as a promising recipe for the construction of artificial moral agents due to its emphasis on moral character and learning. However, given the complex nature of the theory, hardly any work has de facto attempted to implement the core tenets of virtue ethics in moral machines. The main goal of this paper is to demonstrate how virtue ethics can be taken all the way from theory to machine implementation. To achieve this goal, we critically explore the possibilities and challenges for virtue ethics from a computational perspective. Drawing on previous conceptual and technical work, we outline a version of artificial virtue based on moral functionalism, connectionist bottom–up learning, and eudaimonic reward. We then describe how core features of the outlined theory can be interpreted in terms of functionality, which in turn informs the design of components necessary for virtuous cognition. Finally, we present a comprehensive framework for the technical development of artificial virtuous agents and discuss how they can be implemented in moral environments.
Highlights
As artificial systems enter more domains of human life, the last decades have seen an explosion of research dealing with the ethical development and application of AI (AI ethics), and how to build ethical machines.1 While efforts of the former kind have seemingly converged on a set of principles and guidelines (Floridi and Cowls 2019), their capacity to have any substantial impact on the ethical development of AI has been called into question (Hagendorff 2020; Mittelstadt 2019)
Virtue ethics has many times been suggested as a promising recipe for the construction of artificial moral agents due to its emphasis on moral character and learning
Drawing on previous conceptual and technical work, we outline a version of artificial virtue based on moral functionalism, connectionist bottom–up learning, and eudaimonic reward
Summary
As artificial systems enter more domains of human life, the last decades have seen an explosion of research dealing with the ethical development and application of AI (AI ethics), and how to build ethical machines (machine ethics). While efforts of the former kind have seemingly converged on a set of principles and guidelines (Floridi and Cowls 2019), their capacity to have any substantial impact on the ethical development of AI has been called into question (Hagendorff 2020; Mittelstadt 2019). As artificial systems enter more domains of human life, the last decades have seen an explosion of research dealing with the ethical development and application of AI (AI ethics), and how to build ethical machines (machine ethics).. As artificial systems enter more domains of human life, the last decades have seen an explosion of research dealing with the ethical development and application of AI (AI ethics), and how to build ethical machines (machine ethics).1 While efforts of the former kind have seemingly converged on a set of principles and guidelines (Floridi and Cowls 2019), their capacity to have any substantial impact on the ethical development of AI has been called into question (Hagendorff 2020; Mittelstadt 2019). Hardly any technical work has attempted to implement virtue ethics in moral machines..
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