Autonomous Reboot: Kant, the categorical imperative, and contemporary challenges for machine ethicists

Jeffrey White

doi:10.1007/s00146-020-01142-4

Abstract

Ryan Tonkens (2009) has issued a seemingly impossible challenge, to articulate a comprehensive ethical framework within which artificial moral agents (AMAs) satisfy a Kantian inspired recipe—"rational" and "free"—while also satisfying perceived prerogatives of machine ethicists to facilitate the creation of AMAs that are perfectly and not merely reliably ethical. This series of papers meets this challenge by landscaping traditional moral theory in resolution of a comprehensive account of moral agency. The first paper established the challenge and set out autonomy in Aristotelian terms. The present paper interprets Kantian moral theory on the basis of the preceding introduction, argues contra Tonkens that an engineer does not violate the categorical imperative in creating Kantian AMAs, and proposes that a Kantian AMA is not only a possible goal for Machine ethics research, but a necessary one.

Highlights

When everyone contends to achieve what is fine and strains to do the finest actions, everything that is right will be done for the common good, and each person individually will receive the greatest of goods, since that is the character of virtue. – Aristotle1. This series of papers answers Ryan Tonkens’ (2009) challenge for machine ethicists to conceive of a Kantian moral agent without violating Kantian moral principles at the same time
The preceding sketch is intended to inform the possible design of a Kantian artificial moral agents (AMAs)
The difference is felt as pain, and in this concluding section of this second of four papers, we may further specify what motivates the Kantian agent past this obstacle within itself and toward moral self-perfection, with this answering why the development of an AMA conceived is possible, and superior to alternatives, but morally requisite as well

Summary

Introduction

When everyone contends to achieve what is fine and strains to do the finest actions, everything that is right will be done for the common good, and each person individually will receive the greatest of goods, since that is the character of virtue. – Aristotle. He observed that the “Greek schools could never solve their problem of the practical possibility of the highest good” because they mistook the measure of moral worth as either too greatly shaped by human sensible desire or too distant from it” Resolving the "moral law" as representative of this “higher vocation” relative to the human "pathologically affected nature" is central in Kant’s theory (cf The Critique of Practical Reason, chapter 3 "On the incentives of pure practical reason" beginning 5:71 and ending 5:89) and represents his advance over his inherited tradition, including the exposition of the motivation to the common good that Aristotle sketches in terms of virtue (or the pathological lack thereof) for the political animal, citizen, slave, and ruler. The section uncovers the essential motivational dynamics that arise in this fundamental inner self-relation so that we may formally conceive of a Kantian AMA, thereby answering the first part of Tonkens’ challenge

What is morality for Kant?

Autonomous reboot

Meeting the challenge

Discussion and conclusion of the second paper