Challenges to engineering moral reasoners : time and context
Abstract
Programming computers to engage in moral reasoning is not a new idea (Anderson
and Anderson 2011a). Work on the subject has yielded concrete examples of computable
linguistic structures for a moral grammar (Mikhail 2007), the ethical governor architecture for
autonomous weapon systems (Arkin 2009), rule-based systems that implement deontological
principles (Anderson and Anderson 2011b), systems that implement utilitarian principles, and a
hybrid approach to programming ethical machines (Wallach and Allen 2008). This chapter
considers two philosophically informed strategies for engineering software that can engage in
moral reasoning: algorithms based on philosophical moral theories and analogical reasoning
from standard cases.1 Based on the challenges presented to the algorithmic approach, I argue
that a combination of these two strategies holds the most promise and show concrete examples of
how such an architecture could be built using contemporary engineering techniques.