The literature on self-driving cars and ethics continues to grow. Yet much of it focuses on ethical complexities emerging from an individual vehicle. That is an important but insufficient step towards determining how the technology will impact human lives and society more generally. What must complement ongoing discussions is a broader, system level of analysis that engages with the interactions and effects that these cars will have on one another and on the socio-technical systems in which they are (...) embedded. To bring the conversation of self-driving cars to the system level, we make use of two traffic scenarios which highlight some of the complexities that designers, policymakers, and others should consider related to the technology. We then describe three approaches that could be used to address such complexities and their associated shortcomings. We conclude by bringing attention to the “Moral Responsibility for Computing Artifacts: The Rules”, a framework that can provide insight into how to approach ethical issues related to self-driving cars. (shrink)

The introduction of self-driving vehicles gives rise to a large number of ethical issues that go beyond the common, extremely narrow, focus on improbable dilemma-like scenarios. This article provides a broad overview of realistic ethical issues related to self-driving vehicles. Some of the major topics covered are as follows: Strong opinions for and against driverless cars may give rise to severe social and political conflicts. A low tolerance for accidents caused by driverless vehicles may delay the (...) introduction of driverless systems that would substantially reduce the risks. Trade-offs will arise between safety and other requirement on the road traffic system. Over-reliance on the swift collision-avoiding reactions of self-driving vehicles can induce people to take dangerous actions, such as stepping out in front of a car, relying on its fast braking. Children travelling alone can violate safety instructions such as the use of seatbelts. Digital information about routes and destinations can be used to convey commercial and political messages to car users. If fast passage can be bought, then socio-economic segregation of road traffic may result. Terrorists and other criminals can hack into a vehicle and make it crash. They can also use self-driving vehicles for instance to carry bombs to their designed places of detonation or to wreak havoc on a country’s road system. (shrink)

This article puts forward solutions to some of the ethical and legal dilemmas posed in the current discussion on how to program crash algorithms in autonomous or self-driving cars. The first part of the paper defines the scope of the problem in the criminal legal field, and the next section gives a critical analysis of the proposal to always prioritise the interest of the occupant of the vehicle in situations with conflict of interests. The principle of minimizing social (...) damage as a model for configuring self-driving cars is examined in the third section. Despite its apparent plausibility, within the framework of a liberal legal system that recognises humans as free agents who have rights and responsibilities, maximizing the function of social utility does not justify harmful interference into a person’s legal sphere. Therefore, in the fourth part, the author argues the need to program the crash algorithms of autonomous cars based on a deontological understanding of the system of justifications in criminal law. The solution to the dilemma lies in a prior analysis of the legal positions of all agents involved in the conflict, from a perspective of the principles of autonomy and solidarity as the core of the system of justifications. (shrink)

The issue of how to identify the liability of subjects after a traffic accident takes place remains a puzzle regarding the SAE classification system. The SAE system is not good at dealing with the problem of responsibility evaluation; therefore, building a new classification system for self-driving cars from the perspective of the subject's liability is a possible way to solve this problem. This new system divides automated driving into three levels: i) assisted driving based on the (...) will of drivers, ii) automated driving based on the will of the manufacturers, and iii) fully automated driving based on social will. The corresponding responsible subjects for level one, level two, and level three are the drivers, the manufacturers, and society, respectively. (shrink)

Every year, 1.35 million people are killed on roads worldwide and even more people are injured. Emerging self-driving car technology promises to cut this statistic down to a fraction of the current rate. On the face of it, this consideration alone constitutes a strong reason to legally require — once self-driving car technology is widely available and affordable — that all vehicles on public roads be self-driving. Here I critically investigate the question of whether (...) self-driving, or autonomous, vehicles should be legally mandated. I develop an argument — premised upon Mill’s Harm Principle — that any legislation mandating the use of self-driving vehicles on public roads is morally impermissible. The Harm Principle, under its most plausible interpretation, has it that the state is warranted in legislating against some activity only if that activity violates the rights of others. In brief, I argue that a human driver, who opts to drive herself on public roads rather than rely on self-driving technology, does not violate anyone’s rights when she so acts. Consequently, when granting the Harm Principle, it follows that the state is not warranted in mandating the use of self-driving vehicles on public roads. If I am correct, the proponent of a self-driving vehicle mandate must reject the Harm Principle. Given its intuitive plausibility and central place in liberal philosophical thought, this is a weighty cost. (shrink)

Driverless automobility presents a “technological sublime” encompassing both promises and perils. The light side of the emerging transportation future lies, for instance, in the newly gained freedom from driving. The dark side of this sublime includes ethical challenges and potential harm resulting from the required socio-technical transformations of mobility. This article explores contemporary visions for the self-driving car future through the lens of the sublime and some of its theoretical variations, such as the natural, technological, electrical, and (...) digital sublime. Nissan’s IDS Concept preview clip and the Chevrolet FNR trailer serve as examples for this analysis, which aims to demythologize the visual rhetoric of the depicted awe-inspiring self-driving systems. The sublime’s inherent dialectic of inducing both pleasure and displeasure is removed in the corporate utopian visions in favor of an exalting partnership between human and machine. This strategy succeeds by setting the mobility future in the context of controlled parameters such as the trustworthy communicative vehicle, the vital and independent protagonists, and the harmless and unharmed environment. Recognizing such recurring strategies and identifying the controlled parameters which allow the sublime object to electrify, not terrify, is key for a sensible engagement with such imagined futures and their social, cultural, political, economic, environmental, and ethical implications. Such premediations of awe-inspiring technological formations and the underlying logics ask to be unpacked toward decision making that considers all potential facets of the sublime future. (shrink)

Questions of what a self-driving car ought to do if it encounters a situation analogous to the ‘trolley problem’ have dominated recent discussion of the ethics of self-driving cars. This paper argues that this interest is misplaced. If a trolley-style dilemma situation actually occurs, given the limits on what information will be available to the car, the dynamics of braking and tyre traction determine that, irrespective of outcome, it is always least risky for the car to (...) brake in a straight line rather than swerve. (shrink)

: Autonomous driving systems promise important changes for future of transport, primarily through the reduction of road accidents. However, ethical concerns, in particular, two central issues, will be key to their successful development. First, situations of risk that involve inevitable harm to passengers and/or bystanders, in which some individuals must be sacrificed for the benefit of others. Secondly, and identification responsible parties and liabilities in the event of an accident. Our work addresses the first of these ethical problems. We (...) are interested in investigating how humans respond to critical situations and what reactions they consider to be morally right or at least preferable to others. Our experimental approach relies on the trolley dilemma and knowledge gained from previous research on this. More specifically, our main purpose was to test the difference between what human drivers actually decide to do in an emergency situations whilst driving a realistic simulator and the moral choices they make when they pause to consider what they would do in the same situation and to better understand why these choices may differs. Keywords: Self-driving Cars; Trolley Problem; Moral Choices; Moral Responsibility; Virtual Reality Dilemmi morali nelle automobili a guida autonoma Riassunto: I sistemi di guida autonomi promettono importanti cambiamenti per il futuro dei trasporti, principalmente attraverso la riduzione degli incidenti stradali. Tuttavia, vi sono preoccupazioni etiche, in particolare due questioni centrali, fondamentali per il loro sviluppo. In primo luogo, le situazioni di rischio che comportano inevitabili danni ai passeggeri e/o ai pedoni, ovvero situazioni in cui alcune persone devono essere sacrificate a beneficio di altri. In secondo luogo, l’identificazione delle parti responsabili in caso di incidente. Il nostro lavoro affronta il primo di questi problemi etici. Siamo interessati a studiare come gli umani rispondono a situazioni critiche e quali reazioni considerano moralmente giuste o almeno preferibili. Il nostro approccio sperimentale si basa sul trolley problem e sulle conoscenze acquisite da precedenti ricerche su questo ambito. Più specificamente, il nostro scopo principale è quello di testare la differenza tra ciò che i conducenti umani decidono effettivamente di fare in una situazione di emergenza, mentre guidano un simulatore realistico, e le scelte morali che compiono se posti nella stessa situazione e hanno la possibilità di decidere senza limiti di tempo. Lo scopo è inoltre comprendere come e perché queste scelte possono differire. Parole chiave: Automobili a guida autonoma; Trolley problem; Scelte morali; Responsabilità morale, Realtà virtuale. (shrink)

Crashes involving self-driving cars at least superficially resemble trolley dilemmas. This article discusses what lessons machine ethicists working on the ethics of self-driving cars can learn from trolleyology. The article proceeds by providing an account of the trolley problem as a paradox and by distinguishing two types of solutions to the trolley problem. According to an optimistic solution, our case intuitions about trolley dilemmas are responding to morally relevant differences. The pessimistic solution denies that this is (...) the case. An optimistic solution would yield first-order moral insights for the ethics of self-driving cars, but such a solution is difficult to come by. More plausible is the pessimistic solution, and it teaches us a methodological lesson. The lesson is that machine ethicists should discount case intuitions and instead rely on intuitions and judgments at a higher level of generality. (shrink)

The potential development of self-driving cars (also known as autonomous vehicles or AVs – particularly Level 5 AVs) has called the attention of different interested parties. Yet, there are still only a few relevant international regulations on them, no emergency patterns accepted by communities and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), and no publicly accepted solutions to some of their pending ethical problems. Thus, this paper aims to provide some possible answers to these moral and practical dilemmas. In particular, we (...) focus on what AVs should do in no-win scenarios and on who should be held responsible for these types of decisions. A naturalistic perspective on ethics informs our proposal, which, we argue, could represent a pragmatic and realistic solution to the regulation of AVs. We discuss the proposals already set out in the current literature regarding both policy-making strategies and theoretical accounts. In fact, we consider and reject descriptive approaches to the problem as well as the option of using either a strict deontological view or a solely utilitarian one to set AVs’ ethical choices. Instead, to provide concrete answers to AVs’ ethical problems, we examine three hierarchical levels of decision-making processes: country-wide regulations, OEM policies, and buyers’ moral attitudes. By appropriately distributing ethical decisions and considering their practical implications, we maintain that our proposal based on ethical naturalism recognizes the importance of all stakeholders and allows the most able of them to take actions (the OEMs and buyers) to reflect on the moral leeway and weight of their options. (shrink)

Self-driving cars hold out the promise of being safer than manually driven cars. Yet they cannot be a 100 % safe. Collisions are sometimes unavoidable. So self-driving cars need to be programmed for how they should respond to scenarios where collisions are highly likely or unavoidable. The accident-scenarios self-driving cars might face have recently been likened to the key examples and dilemmas associated with the trolley problem. In this article, we critically examine this tempting (...) analogy. We identify three important ways in which the ethics of accident-algorithms for self-driving cars and the philosophy of the trolley problem differ from each other. These concern: the basic decision-making situation faced by those who decide how self-driving cars should be programmed to deal with accidents; moral and legal responsibility; and decision-making in the face of risks and uncertainty. In discussing these three areas of disanalogy, we isolate and identify a number of basic issues and complexities that arise within the ethics of the programming of self-driving cars. (shrink)

To operate in an unpredictable environment, a vehicle with advanced driving assistance systems, such as a robot or a drone, not only needs to register its surroundings but also to combine data from different sensors into a world model, for which it employs filter algorithms. Such world models, as this article argues with reference to the SLAM problem in robotics, consist of nothing other than probabilities about states and events arising in the environment. The model, thus, contains a virtuality (...) of possible worlds that are the basis for adaptive behavior. The article shows that the current development of these technologies requires new concepts because their complex adaptive behaviors cannot be explained by referring them to mere algorithmic processes. Instead, it proposes the heuristic instrument of microdecisions to designate the temporality of decisions between alternatives that are created by probabilistic procedures of world modeling. Microdecisions are more than the implementation of deterministic processes—they decide between possibilities and, thus, always open up the potential of their otherness. By describing autonomous adaptive technologies with this heuristic, the question of sovereignty inevitably arises. It forces us to re-think what autonomy means when decisions can be automated. (shrink)

The moral importance of liability to harm has so far been ignored in the lively debate about what self-driving vehicles should be programmed to do when an accident is inevitable. But liability matters a great deal to just distribution of risk of harm. While morality sometimes requires simply minimizing relevant harms, this is not so when one party is liable to harm in virtue of voluntarily engaging in activity that foreseeably creates a risky situation, while having reasonable alternatives. (...) On plausible assumptions, merely choosing to use a self-driving vehicle typically gives rise to a degree of liability, so that such vehicles should be programmed to shift the risk from bystanders to users, other things being equal. Insofar vehicles cannot be programmed to take all the factors affecting liability into account, there is a pro tanto moral reason not to introduce them, or restrict their use. (shrink)

Self-driving vehicles offer great potential to improve efficiency on roads, reduce traffic accidents, increase productivity, and minimise our environmental impact in the process. However, they have also seen resistance from different groups claiming that they are unsafe, pose a risk of being hacked, will threaten jobs, and increase environmental pollution from increased driving as a result of their convenience. In order to reap the benefits of SDVs, while avoiding some of the many pitfalls, it is important to (...) effectively determine what challenges we will face in the future and what steps need to be taken now to avoid them. The approach taken in this paper is the construction of a likely future, through the process of a policy scenario methodology, if we continue certain trajectories over the coming years. The purpose of this is to articulate issues we currently face and the construction of a foresight analysis of how these may develop in the next 6 years. It will highlight many of the key facilitators and inhibitors behind this change and the societal impacts caused as a result. This paper will synthesise the wide range of ethical, legal, social and economic impacts that may result from SDV use and implementation by 2025, such as issues of autonomy, privacy, liability, security, data protection, and safety. It will conclude with providing steps that we need to take to avoid these pitfalls, while ensuring we reap the benefits that SDVs bring. (shrink)

The convergence of computing, sensing, and communication technology will soon permit large-scale deployment of self-driving vehicles. This will in turn permit a radical transformation of traffic control technology. This paper makes a case for the importance of addressing questions of social justice in this transformation, and sketches a preliminary framework for doing so. We explain how new forms of traffic control technology have potential implications for several dimensions of social justice, including safety, sustainability, privacy, efficiency, and equal access. (...) Our central focus is on efficiency and equal access as desiderata for traffic control design. We explain the limitations of conventional traffic control in meeting these desiderata, and sketch a preliminary vision for a next-generation traffic control tailored to address better the demands of social justice. One component of this vision is cooperative, hierarchically distributed self-organization among vehicles. Another component of this vision is a priority system enabling selection of priority levels by the user for each vehicle trip in the network, based on the supporting structure of non-monetary credits. (shrink)

Self‐driving cars hold out the promise of being much safer than regular cars. Yet they cannot be 100% safe. Accordingly, they need to be programmed for how to deal with crash scenarios. Should cars be programmed to always prioritize their owners, to minimize harm, or to respond to crashes on the basis of some other type of principle? The article first discusses whether everyone should have the same “ethics settings.” Next, the oft‐made analogy with the trolley problem is (...) examined. Then follows an assessment of recent empirical work on lay‐people's attitudes about crash algorithms relevant to the ethical issue of crash optimization. Finally, the article discusses what traditional ethical theories such as utilitarianism, Kantianism, virtue ethics, and contractualism imply about how cars should handle crash scenarios. The aim of the article is to provide an overview of the existing literature on these topics and to assess how far the discussion has gotten so far. (shrink)

Self‐driving cars hold out the promise of being much safer than regular cars. Yet they cannot be 100% safe. Accordingly, we need to think about who should be held responsible when self‐driving cars crash and people are injured or killed. We also need to examine what new ethical obligations might be created for car users by the safety potential of self‐driving cars. The article first considers what lessons might be learned from the growing legal (...) literature on responsibility for crashes with self‐driving cars. Next, worries about responsibility gaps and retribution gaps from the philosophical literature are introduced. This leads to a discussion of whether self‐driving cars are a form of agents that act independently of human agents. It is suggested that it is better to analyze their apparent agency in terms of human–robot collaborations, within which humans play the most important roles. The next topic is the idea that the safety potential of self‐driving cars might create a duty to either switch to self‐driving cars or seek means of making conventional cars safer. Lastly, there is a short discussion of ethical issues related to safe human–robot coordination within mixed traffic featuring both self‐driving cars and conventional cars. (shrink)

Self-driving vehicles will need to make decisions that carry ethical dimensions and manufacturers have (the responsibility) to pre-determine this underlying, deliberate decision-making process. With the rise of self-driving vehicles, scholars have simultaneously started investigating what ethical theories should guide machine behavior, but have not concluded as to which theory should be preferred and adopted. We aim to address this matter by providing a holistic and analytical review of the autonomous driving ethics literature. Based on this (...) review, we summarize the social, moral/legal, and functional advantages and disadvantages of applying particular (traditional) ethical theories to the decision-making of self-driving vehicles. Furthermore, we derive an integrated model that shows how each identified ethical theory could be technically implemented and guide the decision-making of self-driving vehicles. Overall, this article aims to set the groundwork for reflected, successful integration of ethical behavior within self-driving vehicles and deduce an updated research agenda. (shrink)

Self-driving cars currently face a lot of technological problems that need to be solved before the cars can be widely used. However, they also face ethical problems, among which the question of crash-optimization algorithms is most prominently discussed. Reviewing current debates about whether we should use the ethics of the Trolley Dilemma as a guide towards designing self-driving cars will provide us with insights about what exactly ethical research does. It will result in the view that (...) although we need the ethics of the Trolley Dilemma as important input for self-driving cars, the route towards simply implementing it into automated cars is blocked. (shrink)

The discourse around self-driving cars has been dominated by an emphasis on their potential to reduce the number of accidents. At the same time, proponents acknowledge that self-driving cars would inevitably be involved in fatal accidents where moral algorithms would decide the fate of those involved. This is a necessary trade-off, proponents suggest, in order to reap the benefits of this new technology. In this article, I engage this argument, demonstrating how an undue optimism and enthusiasm (...) about this technology is obscuring our ability to see what is at stake and explaining how moving beyond the dominant utilitarian framings around this technology opens up a space for both ethical inquiry and innovative design. I suggest that a genuine caring concern for the many lives lost in car accidents now and in the future—a concern that transcends false binary trade-offs and that recognizes the systemic biases and power structures that make certain groups more vulnerable than others—could serve as a starting point to rethink mobility, as it connects to the design of our cities, the well-being of our communities, and the future of our planet. (shrink)

Self‐driving cars hold out the promise of being much safer than regular cars. Yet they cannot be 100% safe. Accordingly, they need to be programmed for how to deal with crash scenarios. Should cars be programmed to always prioritize their owners, to minimize harm, or to respond to crashes on the basis of some other type of principle? The article first discusses whether everyone should have the same “ethics settings.” Next, the oft‐made analogy with the trolley problem is (...) examined. Then follows an assessment of recent empirical work on lay‐people's attitudes about crash algorithms relevant to the ethical issue of crash optimization. Finally, the article discusses what traditional ethical theories such as utilitarianism, Kantianism, virtue ethics, and contractualism imply about how cars should handle crash scenarios. The aim of the article is to provide an overview of the existing literature on these topics and to assess how far the discussion has gotten so far. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Self-driving cars promise solutions to some of the hazards of human driving but there are important questions about the safety of these new technologies. This paper takes a qualitative social science approach to the question ‘how safe is safe enough?’ Drawing on 50 interviews with people developing and researching self-driving cars, I describe two dominant narratives of safety. The first, safety-in-numbers, sees safety as a self-evident property of the technology and offers metrics in an (...) attempt to reassure the public. The second approach, safety-by-design, starts with the challenge of safety assurance and sees the technology as intrinsically problematic. The first approach is concerned only with performance—what a self-driving system does. The second is also concerned with why systems do what they do and how they should be tested. Using insights from workshops with members of the public, I introduce a further concern that will define trustworthy self-driving cars: the intended and perceived purposes of a system. Engineers’ safety assurances will have their credibility tested in public. ‘How safe is safe enough?’ prompts further questions: ‘safe enough for what?’ and ‘safe enough for whom?’. (shrink)

Much of the debate on the ethics of self-driving cars has revolved around trolley scenarios. This paper instead takes up the political or institutional question of who should decide how a self-driving car drives. Specifically, this paper is on the question of whether and why passengers should be able to control how their car drives. The paper reviews existing arguments—those for passenger ethics settings and for mandatory ethics settings respectively—and argues that they fail. Although the arguments (...) are not successful, they serve as the basis to formulate desiderata that any approach to regulating the driving behavior of self-driving cars ought to fulfill. The paper then proposes one way of designing passenger ethics settings that meets these desiderata. (shrink)

We motivate the desire for self-driving and explain its potential and limitations, and explore the need for—and potential implementation of—morals, ethics, and other value systems as complementary “capabilities” to the Deep Technologies behind self-driving. We consider how the incorporation of such systems may drive or slow adoption of high automation within vehicles. First, we explore the role for morals, ethics, and other value systems in self-driving through a representative hypothetical dilemma faced by a (...) class='Hi'>self-driving car. Through the lens of engineering, we explain in simple terms common moral and ethical frameworks including utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics before characterizing their relationship to the fundamental algorithms enabling self-driving. The concepts of behavior cloning, state-based modeling, and reinforcement learning are introduced, with some algorithms being more suitable for the implementation of value systems than others. We touch upon the contemporary cross-disciplinary landscape of morals and ethics in self-driving systems from a joint philosophical and technical perspective, and close with considerations for practitioners and the public, particularly as individuals may not appreciate the nuance and complexity of using imperfect information to navigate diverse scenarios and tough-to-quantify value systems, while “typical” software development reduces complex problems to black and white decision-making. (shrink)

When explaining human actions, people usually focus on a small subset of potential causes. What leads us to prefer certain explanations for valenced actions over others? The present studies indicate that our moral attitudes often predict our explanatory preferences far better than our beliefs about how causally sensitive actions are to features of the actor's environment. Study 1 found that high-prejudice participants were much more likely to endorse non-agential explanations of an erotic same-sex encounter, such as that one of the (...) men endured a stressful event earlier that day. Study 2 manipulated participants' beliefs about how the agent's behavior depended on features of his environment, finding that such beliefs played no clear role in modeling participants' explanatory preferences. This result emerged both with low- and high-prejudice, US and Indian participants, suggesting that these findings probably reflect a species-typical feature of human psychology. Study 3 found that moral attitudes also predicted explanations for a woman's decision to abort her pregnancy (3a) and a person's decision to convert to Islam (3b). Study 4 found that luck in an action's etiology tends to undermine perceptions of blame more readily than perceptions of praise. Finally, Study 5 found that when explaining support for a rival ideology, both Liberals and Conservatives downplay agential causes while emphasizing environmental ones. Taken together, these studies indicate that our explanatory preferences often reflect a powerful tendency to represent agents as possessing virtuous true selves. Consequently, situation-focused explanations often appear salient because people resist attributing negatively valenced actions to the true self. There is a person/situation distinction, but it is normative. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to deepen the concept of emerging urban mobility technology. Drawing on philosophical everyday and urban aesthetics, as well as the postphenomenological strand in the philosophy of technology, we explicate the relation between everyday aesthetic experience and urban mobility commoning. Thus, we shed light on the central role of aesthetics for providing depth to the important experiential and value-driven meaning of contemporary urban mobility. We use the example of self-driving vehicle (SDV), as potentially (...) mundane, public, dynamic, and social urban robots, for expanding the range of perspectives relevant for our relations to urban mobility technology. We present the range of existing SDV conceptualizations and contrast them with experiential and aesthetic understanding of urban mobility. In conclusion, we reflect on the potential undesired consequences from the depolitization of technological development, and potential new pathways for speculative thinking concerning urban mobility futures in responsible innovation processes. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Almost all participants in the debate about the ethics of accidents with self-driving cars have so far assumed moral universalism. However, universalism may be philosophically more controversial than is commonly thought, and may lead to undesirable results in terms of non-moral consequences and feasibility. There thus seems to be a need to also start considering what I refer to as the “relativistic car” — a car that is programmed under the assumption that what is morally right, wrong, good, (...) bad, etc. is determined by the moral beliefs of one’s society or culture. My investigation of this idea involves six steps. First, I explain why and how the moral universalism/relativism debate is relevant to the issue of self-driving cars. Second, I argue that there are good reasons to consider accident algorithms that assume relativism. Third, I outline how a relativistic car would be programmed to behave. Fourth, I address what advantages such a car would have, both in terms of its non-moral consequences and feasibility. Fifth, I address the relativistic car’s disadvantages. Finally, I qualify and conclude my considerations. (shrink)

Recent simulations by Scanlon et al. showed seemingly spectacular results for the Waymo self-driving vehicle in simulations of real accident situations. In this paper, it is argued that the selection criteria for accident situations must be modified in accordance with the relevant policy alternatives. While Scanlon et al. compare Waymo with old human-driven vehicles, it is argued here that the relevant policy question is whether we ought to use self-driven vehicles or human-driven vehicles in the future, which (...) means that we need to consider whether other technological solutions, which are available but not broadly used in human-driven vehicles, could result in human-driven vehicles managing to avoid the same accidents. In this article, a proposal for a new standard of selection criteria is made. (shrink)

Ethical morality is one of the significant issues in self-driving cars. The paper provides a newer approach to solve the ethical decision problems in self-driving cars until there is no concrete ethical decision to all problems. This paper gives a two-way approach to solve a problem, with first being the mapping of problem to the solution already known or which has a fixed set of solutions and action priorities defined to a problem previously. Now, if no (...) solution is found or mapping is unsuccessful, then the second stage activates, where the solution from Deep Q-learning model is calculated. It estimates the best Q value and returns that solution or action which maximizes the reward at that instance. The reward function is designed with decreasing priorities and acts accordingly, where the users can change or define their priorities if needed. The case study and results show that the solution that is present in the paper will lead to solving ethical morality problems in self-driving cars up to a great extent. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that automated vehicles should not swerve to avoid a person or vehicle in its path, unless they can do so without imposing risks onto others. I will argue that this is the conclusion that we should reach even if we start by assuming that we should divert the trolley in the standard trolley case. In defence of this claim, I appeal to the distribution of moral and legal responsibilities, highlighting the importance of safe spaces, (...) and arguing in favour of constraints on what can be done to minimise casualties. My arguments draw on the methodology associated with the trolley problem. As such, this paper also defends this methodology, highlighting a number of ways in which authors misunderstand and misrepresent the trolley problem. For example, the ‘trolley problem’ is not the ‘name given by philosophers to classic examples of unavoidable crash scenarios, historically involving runaway trolleys’, as Millar suggests, and trolley cases should not be compared with ‘model building in the sciences’, as Gogoll and Müller suggest. Trolley cases have more in common with lab experiments than model building, and the problem referred to in the trolley problem is not the problem of deciding what to do in any one case. Rather, it refers to the problem of explaining what appear to be conflicting intuitions when we consider two cases together. The problem, for example, could be: how do we justify the claim that automated vehicles should not swerve even if we accept the claim that we should divert the trolley in an apparently similar trolley case? (shrink)

BackgroundIn Sweden, individuals with visual field loss have their driving license withdrawn. The literature clearly indicates that individuals with VFL are unsafe drivers on a group level. However, many drivers with VFL can be safe on an individual level. The literature also suggests that self-perception, beliefs, and insights of one’s own capabilities are related to driving performance. This study had three aims: To investigate self-perceived driving capability ratings for individuals with VFL; to compare these ratings (...) between groups with different medical conditions associated with VFL ; and to relate the self-perception ratings to actual driving performance in an advanced driving simulator.MethodsParticipants comprised 723 individuals whose driver’s license had been withdrawn because of VFL and 92 normally sighted elderly individuals. All participants completed a background survey, rated difficulties with different traffic situations, rated their strengths and weaknesses as drivers, and rated aspects that were important for causing traffic accidents. Of the VFL group participants, 264 also completed a simulator-based driving test that they knew could lead to renewal of their driving license. VFL participants and normally sighted was at the same age when they completed the simulator driving test.ResultsOverall, individuals with VFL rated their capabilities as high on all instruments and scales used, even higher than the elderly normally sighted control group. The only VFL etiology group that rated lower than other groups was the diabetes group. Safety orientation and internal control orientation values were best at discriminating between VFL participants in terms of self-perception of driving performance. Participants categorized as “high” in terms of safety skills and internal control were more modest in their ratings. Finally, participants who passed the simulated driving test did not differ from those who failed, in any of the self-perception measures.ConclusionSelf-perception ratings among individuals with VFL were higher than those of normally sighted elderly individuals. Self-assessed skills did not predict driving performance. Groups with different VFL etiologies rated similarly. Self-ratings of driving abilities cannot be used to assess actual driving performance. Actual driving tests are necessary to discriminate between safe and unsafe drivers with VFL. (shrink)

Driving is central to adult independence and autonomy; yet most autistic young adults do not acquire driver’s licenses. It is important to understand barriers to achieving this milestone for autistic adults. Differences in negative affect and emotion dysregulation associated with autism may interfere with managing difficult driving situations. The current study compared perceived driving difficulty, emotion dysregulation, and negative affect in emerging drivers with and without autistic traits, and investigated how emotion dysregulation and negative affect relate to (...) perceived DD. We expected greater perceived DD, emotion dysregulation, and negative affect in participants with AT and a positive correlation of perceived DD with both emotion dysregulation and negative affect in the whole sample. Thirty-seven adolescents and young adults self-reported perceived DD in 15 scenarios and completed the Difficulty in Emotion Dysregulation Scale and the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale. Autistic participants scored significantly higher on mean perceived DD, DERS Impulse subscale, DASS total and DASS Stress subscale scores. Perceived DD positively correlated with the DERS and DASS total scores, all DASS subscales, and DERS Nonacceptance, Goals, and Impulse subscales across the whole sample. The findings highlight the roles of emotion dysregulation and negative affect in perceived DD in emerging drivers with AT. In particular, emotional stress and impulsivity may map onto mechanisms of over-reactivity to negative affect and explain why autistic people perceive particular situations as difficult when driving. Implications and directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

This book is the first comprehensive study of Rousseau's rich and complex theory of the type of self-love (amour proper) that, for him, marks the central difference between humans and the beasts. Amour proper is the passion that drives human individuals to seek the esteem, approval, admiration, or love--the recognition--of their fellow beings. Neuhouser reconstructs Rousseau's understanding of what the drive for recognition is, why it is so problematic, and how its presence opens up far-reaching developmental possibilities for creatures (...) that possess it. One of Rousseau's central theses is that amour proper in its corrupted, manifestations--pride or vanity--is the principal source of an array of evils so widespread that they can easily appear to be necessary features of the human condition: enslavement, conflict, vice, misery, and self-estrangement. Yet Rousseau also argues that solving these problems depends not on suppressing or overcoming the drive for recognition but on cultivating it so that it contributes positively to the achievement of freedom, peace, virtue, happiness, and unalienated selfhood. Indeed, Rousseau goes so far as to claim that, despite its many dangers, the need for recognition is a condition of nearly everything that makes human life valuable and that elevates it above mere animal existence: rationality, morality, freedom--subjectivity itself--would be impossible for humans if it were not for amour proper and the relations to others it impels us to establish. (shrink)

The first few years of driving is a critical period when driving skills develop and the driving style is established. While the actual driving skills improve during the first few years of driving, a novice driver’s view of himself/herself as a safe and/or skilful driver also develops rapidly. The aim of this study was to investigate self-evaluated driver safety and perceptual-motor skills among different age groups of young drivers, along with the relationships between (...) class='Hi'>self-evaluated skills and driving behaviour. The sample consisted of a stratified random sample of 18–25-year-old drivers from the Finnish driving licence register. The questionnaires, which included the Driver Skill Inventory, Driver Behaviour Questionnaire and background information, were completed and returned by a total of 1,058 participants. While female drivers assessed their safety skills to be higher than their perceptual-motor skills, the opposite was true for males. In both sexes, perceptual-motor skills increased, and safety skills decreased with experience. Perceptual-motor skills correlated negatively with safety skills, lapses and errors, but positively with aggressive and ordinary violations. Safety skills correlated negatively with all DBQ variables. Safety orientation seems to be most clearly reflected in deliberate aberrant driving behaviours. Sex differences were observed in the development of behaviours and skills, perceptual-motor skills only increased with age among males, while safety skills decreased through experience among both men and women. Results showed that driving experience was strongly related to both driving style and the drivers’ view of their skills, highlighting the importance of the first few years of driving. (shrink)

The progress in artificial intelligence enables us to conceive adaptive systems whose characteristics are nearer and nearer to those of living beings. These characteristics though depend on ingenious choices by the designer of these systems: Initial conditions, parameters, optimisation functions, gradient and measure of fitness within the environment. Nevertheless, in living systems which are non-finalist, there are no programmers or designers to conceive of such ingenious choices. Our paper “Self-Programming Machines (I)” presents a non-finalist model since initial states and (...) functions are randomly chosen at the beginning and once and for all. In spite of the fact that they are non-finalist, these machines always stabilise at fixed points when they are connected to an external process. (shrink)

Chemistry is engaged with a subject that is not static but evolving in time, in chemical space, namely, the collection of all substances and reactions reported over time. If we accept that premise, we can identify the path dependencies and self-reinforcing mechanisms that determined its current space and selected it across historical alternatives. In particular, data analysis allows us to identify two crucial turning points. One was the introduction of structural theory in 1860, the other a technological shift around (...) 1980. (shrink)

If Clark and Dudrick have their way, gone will be the days of breezy writings on Nietzsche that recruit a phrase from here, a paragraph from there, and construct an interpretation from the resultant mélange. Clark and Dudrick advocate a meticulous, line-by-line study of Nietzsche’s text, with painstaking attention not only to the broader context of his claims, but even to the precise intent of the images and metaphors that he employs. Here, we find a level of textual scrutiny and (...) careful consideration of context that has been largely absent in Nietzsche scholarship. To get a flavor of the book, consider the fact that Clark and Dudrick spend no fewer than sixty-three pages on the preface and first four sections of .. (shrink)

For years, scholars have claimed that suicide terrorists are not suicidal, but rather psychologically normal individuals inspired to sacrifice their lives for an ideological cause, due to a range of social and situational factors. I agree that suicide terrorists are shaped by their contexts, as we all are. However, I argue that these scholars went too far. InThe Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive Killers, I take the opposing view, based on my (...) in-depth analyses of suicide attackers from Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America; attackers who were male, female, young, old, Islamic, and Christian; attackers who carried out the most deadly and the least deadly strikes. I present evidence that in terms of their behavior and psychology, suicide terrorists are much like others who commit conventional suicides, murder-suicides, or unconventional suicides where mental health problems, personal crises, coercion, fear of an approaching enemy, or hidden self-destructive urges play a major role. I also identify critical differences between suicide terrorists and those who have genuinely sacrificed their lives for a greater good. By better understanding suicide terrorists, experts in the behavioral and brain sciences may be able to pioneer exciting new breakthroughs in security countermeasures and suicide prevention. And even more ambitiously, by examining these profound extremes of the human condition, perhaps we can more accurately grasp the power of the human survival instinct among those who are actually psychologically healthy. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

All epistemic agents physically consist of parts that must somehow comprise an integrated cognitive self. Biological individuals consist of subunits (organs, cells, molecular networks) that are themselves complex and competent in their own context. How do coherent biological Individuals result from the activity of smaller sub-agents? To understand the evolution and function of metazoan bodies and minds, it is essential to conceptually explore the origin of multicellularity and the scaling of the basal cognition of individual cells into a coherent (...) larger organism. In this paper I synthesize ideas in cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and developmental physiology toward a hypothesis about the origin of Individuality: “Scale-Free Cognition”. I propose a fundamental definition of an Individual based on the ability to pursue goals at an appropriate level of scale and organization, and suggest a formalism for defining and comparing the cognitive capacities of highly diverse types of agents. Any Self is demarcated by a computational surface – the spatio-temporal boundary of events that it can measure, model, and try to affect. This surface sets a functional boundary - a cognitive “light cone” which defines the scale and limits of its cognition. I hypothesize that higher-level goal-directed activity and agency, resulting in larger cognitive boundaries, evolve from the primal homeostatic drive of living things to reduce stress – the difference between current conditions and life-optimal conditions. The mechanisms of developmental bioelectricity - the ability of all cells to form electrical networks that process information - suggests a plausible set of gradual evolutionary steps that naturally lead from physiological homeostasis in single cells to memory, prediction, and ultimately complex cognitive agents, via scale-up of the drive of infotaxis. Recent data on the molecular mechanisms of pre-neural bioelectricity suggest a model of how increasingly sophisticated cognitive functions emerge smoothly from cell-cell communication used to guide embryogenesis and regeneration. This set of hypotheses provides a novel perspective on numerous phenomena, such as cancer, and makes several unique, testable predictions for interdisciplinary research that have implications not only for evolutionary developmental biology but also for biomedicine and perhaps artificial intelligence and exobiology. (shrink)