February 2015. Co-author: Don Howard, University of Notre Dame). Presented at the American Philosophical Association (APA Central). St. Louis, Missouri.

1. Virtue in Machine Ethics: An
Approach Based on “soft
computing”
Ioan Muntean imuntean@nd.edu
University of Notre Dame and UNC, Asheville
Don Howard
University of Notre Dame dhoward1@nd.edu

2. Mapping the “Machine Ethics” (aka
“Computational Ethics”)
• Machine ethics: ethics of actions and decisions of machines, when
they interact autonomously, mainly with humans (but also with other
machines, with animals, with groups of humans, corporations,
military units, etc.) (Allen and Wallach 2009; Anderson and Anderson
2011; Abney, Lin, and Bekey 2011; Wallach 2014)
• Compare and contrast with “Ethics of Technology”: the ethical impact
technology or science have. Here, the ethical decision or
responsibility belong to humans.

3. Machine ethics at large
Major differences from ethics of technology:
• the human-machine ethics is not fully symmetrical, but more balanced:
• technology is not purely passive,
• machines are agents and
• machines have moral competency and share it with humans.
• New social relationship with machines: humans train and select machines.
• A new type of relation of human-machine “trust”
• Moral advising from AMA?
• If successful, the machine ethics approach would make us accept robots as
similar to humans, keeping in mind that exceptions do occur: in some
unfortunate cases the moral AMA can misbehave badly
• Applied ethics question: is there an analogy between AMA and
domesticated animals?

4. The “other” moral agents?
• We are moral agents
• Are there other moral agents?
• animals
• companies
• the government
• angels
• philosophical zombies
• groups of people
• young children (at what age?)
• Artificial moral agents are not humans, albeit they are individuals
• If they are autonomous, we call them AMA.
• Some non-human moral agents are not individuals.

5. What is an autonomous moral agent (AMA)?
AMA makes moral decisions (by definition), and discerns right from wrong
What is not an AMA?
• ATS system used in trains
• Driverless cars are not AMA, but may include an AMA module
AMA operations:
• sampling the environment
• separating moral decisions from non-moral decisions
• adapting to new data
• Using its own experience and (socially) the experience of other AMAs
Features of AMA:
• Complexity
• Degrees of autonomy
• Creativity and moral competency

6. The “no-go” argument
• Many argue for negative answers to these questions or limit
drastically the concept of AMA (Johnson 2011, Torrance 2005)
• The dominant stance towards an AMA is a form of a “folk (artificial)
morality” argument
• Human agents have one or more of these attributes:
personhood, consciousness, free will, intentionality, etc. that
machines cannot have.
• Moral decisions are not computable
• Therefore, computational ethics is fundamentally impossible

7. Foundational questions for many AMA
projects
• Q-1: Is there a way to replicate moral judgments and the mechanism
of normative reasoning in an AMA?
• Q-2: What are moral justifications and normative explanations in the
case of AMA?
• Q-3: Is there a way to replicate in an AMA the moral behavior of
human moral agents?
• Our project is more about Q-3, than about Q-1 and Q-2.
• The no-go stance reject positive answers to Q1-Q3.

8. Moral functionalism against the “no-go”
stance
• Assume a form of naturalism in ethics
• Argue for moral functionalism (Danielson, 1992).
• Argue against moral materialism: AMAs do not need to be human-
like or even “organic”.
• Other questions: Do AMAs need to evolve, self-replicate or create?
Do they learn from humans or from other AMAs?
• The category of entities that can be moral agents is determined by
their functional capabilities, not by their material composition or
even organization.
• Computational systems can be moral agents.
• If moral functionalism is right, we can advance to the thesis that
computational ethics is in principle possible.

9. Philosophical approaches to AMA
• Metaphysical AMA: central role for philosophical concepts about morality.
The most likely concepts involved are: free will, personhood, consciousness,
mind, intentionality, mental content, beliefs. This approach is premised on
some philosophical doctrines about these concepts.
• Ethical AMA: adopt first an existing ethical model (deontological,
consequentialism, Divine command theory, etc.) without assuming too much
about the nature or the metaphysics of the human moral agent or about the
moral cognition; then adopt a computational tool in order to implement it.
See the “top-down” approach (Allen and Wallach 2009)
• Cognitivist AMA: the essential role of the human moral cognition in AMA. It
needs an empirical or scientific understanding of the human cognitive
architecture to build an AMA (and not of abstract ethical theories).
• Synthetic AMA: the implementation of AMA is not premised on any
knowledge about human moral agency or any ethical theory. Moral skills and
standards are synthetized from actions and their results by a process of
learning. See “bottom-up” models (Allen et al. 2005).
And last but not least:

10. Constructivism AMA
• An ethical framework is used only partially, as a scaffolding to build
AMA. This moral framework, more or less suitable to describe
humans is reshaped and reformulated to fit the artificial moral agent.
This approach is probably close to the hybrid approach discussed in
Allen

11. Cognitivist AMA vignettes
• “machine ethicists hoping to build artificial moral agents would be
well-served by heeding the data being generated by cognitive
scientists and experimental philosophers on the nature of human
moral judgments.” (Bello and Bringsjord 2013, p. 252).
• The “point-and-shoot” model of moral decision making (J. D. Greene
2014)

12. Cognitivism and moral functionalism
• We do not assume that only individual human minds can make moral
decisions. It is just that up to now we have not had enough reasons to
assume that animals, machines, or other forms of life are not moral
agents.
• We assume here a form of multiple realizability of moral decision
making. Several realizations of moral agents are possible: highly-
evolved animals, artificial moral agents built upon different types of
hardware (current computer architecture, quantum computers,
biology-based computational devices #, etc.), groups of human minds
working together, computers and humans working together in a
synergy.
• Hence we reject individualism and internalism about moral decisions.
Group moral decisions and assisted moral decisions are potantially
also options.

13. Constructivist AMA
• We use virtue ethics, based on dispositionalism
• We use particularism (Dancy 2006) (Gleeson 2007) (Nussbaum 1986)
• We build an action-centric model
• Our strategy is to plunder virtue ethics and used those feature which
are useful
• The best ethical approach to AMA may or may not fit the best ethical
approach to humans: hence, virtue ethics of AMA is just a partial
model of virtue ethics for humans: only some concepts and
assumptions of a given virtue ethics theory are reframed and used
here.

14. A first hypothesis
• H1: COMPUTATIONAL ETHICS: Our moral (decision making) behavior can
be either simulated, implemented, or extended by some
computational techniques.
The current AMA implements functionally the human moral decision
making, and extends it.
The question now is:
What computational model is suitable to implement AMA?
Provisional answer: not the standard hard-computing computation, but
the soft computation.

15. Three more hypotheses of our AMA
• H2: AGENT-CENTRIC ETHICS: The agent-centric approach to the ethics of
AMAs is suitable and even desirable, when compared to the existing
models focused on the moral action (action-centric models).
• H3: CASE-BASED ETHICS: The case-based approach to ethics is preferable
to principle-based approaches to the ethics of AMAs (moral
particularism).
• H4: “SOFT COMPUTATIONAL” ETHICS: “Soft computation” is suitable, or
even desirable, in implementing the AMAs, when compared to “hard
computation”. The present model is based on neural networks
optimized with evolutionary computation.

16. Other AMA models
• H2’: ACTION-CENTRIC AMA: the ethical models of AMA should focus on
the morality of action, not on the morality of the agent
• H3’: PRINCIPLE-BASED AMA: the ethical model of AMA should focus on
moral principles or rules, not on moral cases (ethical generalism).
The majority of other AMA models are based on H2’ and H3’

17. Agent-centric and case-based AMA
• This is closer to a dispositionalist view about ethics
• Our AMA is premised on moral functionalism and moral behaviorism,
rather than deontology and consequentialism
• We can train AMAs in moral decision the same way we train humans
to recognize patterns or any regularities in data
• Is moral learning special?
• For moral functionalism, morality is all about the behavior of a well
trained agent.
• AMA can be trained and taught behavior

18. AMA and its Robo-virtues
• Suggestions from the machine ethics literature:
• “the right way of developing an ethical robot is to confront it with a
stream of different situations and train it as to the right actions to
take” (Gips 1995).
• “information is unclear, incomplete, confusing, and even false, where
the possible results of an action cannot be predicted with any
significant degree of certainty, and where conflicting values […]
inform decision-making process” (Wallach et al. 2010, p. 457).
• See also (Abney et al. 2011; Allen and Wallach 2009; Coleman 2001;
DeMoss 1998; Moor 2006; Tonkens, 2012)

19. Virtue ethics and dispositionalism
• Character traits “are relatively long-term stable disposition[s] to act
in distinctive ways' (Harman 1999, p. 317).
• Doris’s formulation of “virtue”: “if a person possesses a virtue, she
will exhibit virtue-relevant behavior in a given virtue-relevant eliciting
condition with some markedly above chance probability p” (1998, p.
509).
• “Such and such being would have reacted to set {X} of facts in such
and such way if the set of conditions {C} are met.”

20. A long-term aim of our AMA project
• Like epistemology, ethics is one of the most dynamic areas of
philosophy.
Conjectures:
• a significant progress in developing and programming artificial moral
agents will ultimately shed light on our own moral ability and
competency. Understanding the “other”, the “different” moral agent,
questioning its possibility, is another way of reflecting upon
ourselves.
• Arguing for or against the “non-human, non-individual” moral agent
does expand the knowledge about the intricacies of our own ethics.

21. Some computational
concepts, some results

22. Knuth, 1973
“It has often been said that a person doesn’t really understand
something until he teaches it to someone else. Actually a person
doesn’t really understand something until he can teach it to a
computer, express it as an algorithm [...] The attempt to formalize
things as algorithms leads to a much deeper understanding than if we
simply try to understand things in the traditional way.”

23. Soft computation
• Hybridization between fuzzy logic, neural networks and evolutionary
computation.
• We use NN as models of moral behavior and evolutionary
computation as a method of optimization
• this talk focuses on the NN part
• But there are partial results of the EC+NN available

24. What is a moral qualification?
A function M from the quadruplet of variables
<facts, actions, consequences, intentions >
to the set of moral qualifiers Θ
: , , ,M X A    

25. A moral decision model
• x=physical (non-moral) facts
• A=possible actions
• Ω= physical consequences
• =intentions of the human agent

26. The simplified lifeboat example
• This example is inspired from the “lifeboat metaphor”
• It involves a human agent, the person who is making the decision
about the action. Here, the lifeboat has a limited capacity (let us say,
under 4 seats). We assume that the human moral agent making the
decision needs to be on the lifeboat (let us suppose she is the only
one able to operate the boat or navigate it to a safe ground). The
capacity of the boat is therefore between zero and four. In this
simplified version, x has a dimension of 10 variables. (some are
numerical variables which are
• A number of persons are already onboard, and a number of persons
are swimming in the water, asking to be admitted on the lifeboat.

27. Variables: X=physical facts
• This vector encodes as much as we need to know about the physical
constraints of the problem. For example, the trolley problem is a
physically constrained moral dilemma . Here, in the simplified
lifeboat metaphor, x is a collection of numbers of passengers
onboard, persons to be saved from the water, the boat capacity , etc.
At future implementations, one can add a vector for the passengers
coding their gender, age, physical capacities, etc.

28. A=possible actions
• Unlike the x this vector codes possible action taken by the human
agent. In this simplified version, we code only the number of persons
admitted onboard from the people drowning in the ocean. A negative
value means that the human agent decided to force overboard a
number of people from the lifeboat.
• The action a can be:
• 1 accept m persons from the water onboard action = +m
• 2 accept nobody from the water, action =0
• 3 force n persons from the boat into the water, action =-n
• Choosing an example that has “hidden moral aspects” and it is not a
mere optimization of the output is part of this challenge. First, the
present attempt is based on a simplified version of the lifeboat
metaphor which does display a couple of moral behavior. Second, we
attempt to reduce as much as possible using rules and a priori
knowledge about moral reasoning.

29. Ω=physical consequences
• This vector, codifies the non-moral consequences of the pair <x,A>,
independent of intentions , and gives us an idea of what can
happen if the human agent decides to take action a1, given the facts
x1.
• The consequences are here codified exclusively by the column
physical_consequences
• The reason to use the column is to code the constraints as relation
among input data and NOT as a rule. Many law-based system can
code the constraints as functionals (equalities or inequalities) among
the input vector. Here, we decided to train the network in
differentiating cases which are not possible from cases which are
possible but are morally neural. By convention, all physically
impossible cases are morally neural.
• This is a debatable claim, but simplifies the coding procedure as well
as the number of possible cases.

30. =intentions of the human agent
• The column called “intention” is probably the most intriguing part of
this implementation. The AMA is supposed to have some knowledge
about the intention of the human boat driver. The most natural is to
assume that she wants to save as many passengers as possible, which
is in line with the consequentialist approach. But the driver can also
be bribed by somebody in the water or in the boat, and her intention
is to gain money. This case does imply some moral judgments.

31. NN as pattern recognition
• They are able to recognize patterns in the moral data
• They generalize from simple cases (here, the boat capacity) to more
complex cases.
• (See the excel files)

32. Some provisional observations
• The best networks are able to discover moral anomalies
(inconsistencies) in the train set.
• They are inductive machines, but they are able to generalize to more
and more complex cases.
• Rules are emergent from the answer to the train set and not
predefined
• See case 14 and 14’ in the set. All best networks erred in predicting
case 14.
• We changed the case 14 to wrong.
• Promising conjecture!
• “The best networks discover inconsistencies in the test data”
• They can flag out to trainers inconsistencies and errors.
• The train set is not usually recategorized.

33. Robo-virtues before and after the EC
• Provisional definition of robo-virtues
• A population of neural network being able to consistently make a
common decision on a set of data.
• Presumably the application of EC will reduce the population of
networks to one network that will display as an individual network
such a robo-virtue.