With recent advancements in systems engineering and artificial intelligence, autonomous agents are increasingly being called upon to execute tasks that have normative relevance. These are tasks that directly—and potentially adversely—affect human well-being and demand of the agent a degree of normative-sensitivity and -compliance. Such norms and normative principles are typically of a social, legal, ethical, empathetic, or cultural (‘SLEEC’) nature. Whereas norms of this type are often framed in the abstract, or as high-level principles, addressing normative concerns in concrete applications (...) of autonomous agents requires the refinement of normative principles into explicitly formulated practical rules. This paper develops a process for deriving specification rules from a set of high-level norms, thereby bridging the gap between normative principles and operational practice. This enables autonomous agents to select and execute the most normatively favourable action in the intended context premised on a range of underlying relevant normative principles. In the translation and reduction of normative principles to SLEEC rules, we present an iterative process that uncovers normative principles, addresses SLEEC concerns, identifies and resolves SLEEC conflicts, and generates both preliminary and complex normatively-relevant rules, thereby guiding the development of autonomous agents and better positioning them as normatively SLEEC-sensitive or SLEEC-compliant. (shrink)

With recent advancements in systems engineering and artificial intelligence, autonomous agents are increasingly being called upon to execute tasks that have normative relevance. These are tasks that directly—and potentially adversely—affect human well-being and demand of the agent a degree of normative-sensitivity and -compliance. Such norms and normative principles are typically of a social, legal, ethical, empathetic, or cultural nature. Whereas norms of this type are often framed in the abstract, or as high-level principles, addressing normative concerns in concrete applications of (...) autonomous agents requires the refinement of normative principles into explicitly formulated practical rules. This paper develops a process for deriving specification rules from a set of high-level norms, thereby bridging the gap between normative principles and operational practice. This enables autonomous agents to select and execute the most normatively favourable action in the intended context premised on a range of underlying relevant normative principles. In the translation and reduction of normative principles to SLEEC rules, we present an iterative process that uncovers normative principles, addresses SLEEC concerns, identifies and resolves SLEEC conflicts, and generates both preliminary and complex normatively-relevant rules, thereby guiding the development of autonomous agents and better positioning them as normatively SLEEC-sensitive or SLEEC-compliant. (shrink)

In Bancoult, a majority of the House of Lords upheld the British government's use of the royal prerogative to expel the population of the Chagos Islands from their homeland. The majority acknowledged that the government's treatment of the Chagossians was disturbing, but held that the law left them with no choice but to hold the orders valid. In this article, I draw a parallel between this decision and the 18th-century judicial response to the Zong affair—where over a hundred slaves were (...) thrown off a ship to drown in the sea. Both decisions are cloaked in formalist rhetoric but, as I show through an examination of the law as it stood prior to each of the decisions, the actual legal reasoning in both decisions is so without basis as to be unsustainable on any formalist or legalist account. Rather, the decision in Bancoult, like the decision in the Zong, shows all the hallmarks of being a purely pragmatic one, prompted by broader concerns as to the practical impact of a contrary decision and the precedent it would set. The inherent limitations of this mode of judicial reasoning make its deployment in Bancoult troubling. (shrink)