Abstract
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to proliferate into every area of modern life, there is no doubt that society has to think deeply about the potential impact, whether negative or positive, that it will have. Whilst scholars recognise that AI can usher in a new era of personal, social and economic prosperity, they also warn of the potential for it to be misused towards the detriment of society. Deliberate strategies are therefore required to ensure that AI can be safely integrated into society in a manner that would maximise the good for as many people as possible, whilst minimising the bad. One of the most urgent societal expectations of artificial agents is the need for them to behave in a manner that is morally relevant, i.e. to become artificial moral agents (AMAs). In this article, I will argue that exemplarism, an ethical theory based on virtue ethics, can be employed in the building of computationally rational AMAs with weak machine ethics. I further argue that three features of exemplarism, namely grounding in moral exemplars, meeting community expectations and practical simplicity, are crucial to its uniqueness and suitability for application in building AMAs that fit the ethos of AI4SG.
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Notes
The three main ethical theories in normative ethics are consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics.
Often translated from Greek to English as “happiness”, “flourishing”, “well-being” or even the “good life”.
From a design perspective, this would mean using a learning-based approach to form an internal representation of moral values and a completely different decision-making procedure to make moral decisions. This is similar in approach to how Howard and Muntean (2016) designed their AMA, although they have slightly different reasons for using this technique.
Aristotle believed that a person needs a balance between the vices of deficiency and excess to be virtuous. This balance can be thought of as a conceptual mid-point between two opposite vices—a “golden mean”.
This scenario is mostly based on a collection of case studies on classroom ethics by Levinson and Fay (2016). I have merely replaced the human teacher with Robo-teacher in the scenario, and used different names for the student(s).
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Mabaso, B.A. Artificial Moral Agents Within an Ethos of AI4SG. Philos. Technol. 34 (Suppl 1), 7–21 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00400-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00400-z