Formalisation and Evaluation of Properties for Consequentialist Machine Ethics

Formalisation and Evaluation of Properties for Consequentialist Machine Ethics

Raynaldio Limarga, Yang Song, Abhaya Nayak, David Rajaratnam, Maurice Pagnucco

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 440-448. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/49

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies continue to influence our daily lives, there has been a growing need to ensure that AI enabled decision making systems adhere to principles expected of human decision makers. This need has given rise to the area of Machine Ethics. We formalise several ethical principles from the philosophical literature in the situation calculus framework to verify the ethical permissibility of a plan. Moreover, we propose several important properties, including some of our own that are intuitively appealing, and a number derived from the social choice literature that would appear to be relevant in evaluating the various approaches. Finally we provide an assessment of how our various situation calculus models of Machine Ethics that we examine satisfy the important properties we have identified.
Keywords:
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: ETF: Moral decision making
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: KRR: Reasoning about actions
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: KRR: Common-sense reasoning
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: KRR: Other