Abstract
How should driverless vehicles respond to situations of unavoidable personal harm? This paper takes up the case of self-driving cars as a prominent example of algorithmic moral decision-making, an emergent type of morality that is evolving at a high pace in a digitised business world. As its main contribution, it juxtaposes dilemma decision situations relating to ethical crash algorithms for autonomous cars to two edge cases: the case of manually driven cars facing real-life, mundane accidents, on the one hand, and the dilemmatic situation in theoretically constructed trolley cases, on the other. The paper identifies analogies and disanalogies between the three cases with regard to decision makers, decision design, and decision outcomes. The findings are discussed from the angle of three perspectives: aspects where analogies could be found, those where the case of self-driving cars has turned out to lie in between both edge cases, and those where it entirely departs from either edge case. As a main result, the paper argues that manual driving as well as trolley cases are suitable points of reference for the issue of designing ethical crash algorithms only to a limited extent. Instead, a fundamental epistemic and conceptual divergence of dilemma decision situations in the context of self-driving cars and the used edge cases is substantiated. Finally, the areas of specific need for regulation on the road to introducing autonomous cars are pointed out and related thoughts are sketched through the lens of the humanistic paradigm.
Highlights
Humanistic Management: State of Research and Research Gap humanistic management is a relatively young field of research that has emerged mainly during the last ten years, its body of literature covers a broad range of subjects
It juxtaposes dilemma decision situations relating to ethical crash algorithms for autonomous cars to two edge cases: the case of manually driven cars facing reallife, mundane accidents, on the one hand, and the dilemmatic situation in theoretically constructed trolley cases, on the other
The paper argues that there are only very few touch points between dilemma decision situations related to self-driving cars on the one hand and the used edge cases of manual driving and trolley cases on the other hand
Summary
Humanistic management is a relatively young field of research that has emerged mainly during the last ten years, its body of literature covers a broad range of subjects. JafariNaimi (2018: 303) observes a “need for algorithmic morality, broadly construed as a set of variables and action scripts, that could decide the fate of people involved in such scenarios in order to bring self-driving cars to the masses.” Against this background, the decision situation in the context of autonomous driving that is analysed in this paper is a situation of human decision-making on the design of crash algorithms – and not machines making autonomous decisions as full ethical agents. The German Ethics Commission specifies: “In the case of automated and connected driving systems, the accountability that was previously the sole preserve of the individual shifts from the motorist to the manufacturers and operators of the technological systems and to the bodies responsible for taking infrastructure, policy and legal decisions.” (2017: 7, Rule No 10) One of the most critical points is that directing an autonomous vehicle towards a specific person may be considered an act of intentionally targeting individuals and a discriminatory practice Owing to these cumulative effects, the scale of the consequences resulting from a moral decision is unpredictable at the time of programming
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